


Mercy (Is My Symphony)

by BadWolf256



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Canon Rewrite
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:54:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24776476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadWolf256/pseuds/BadWolf256
Summary: We'll be safe here,Katherine had said. Later, she'll learn, it's a lie.
Relationships: Elena Gilbert/Damon Salvatore, Elena Gilbert/Elijah Mikaelson
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> **Author's Note: So while working on my other TVD fic, I decided to go back to an old fic I wrote and rework it whenever I felt like I needed to take a break. Unfortunately, that meant that I fell in love with it all over again. Why is this a bad thing, you might ask? Well, to be perfectly honest, this story is _really_ AU, to the point where I feel like a lot of people might not have any interest in reading it at all. And that's hard to deal with when you've put a lot of time and effort into a story. But I also think that it's important to put your work out there - because for every person who would want to just pass this one by, I'd like to think there's also someone who wondered the same thing that I did when I sat down to start writing this. That question, of course, is what would have happened if Katherine decided to protect the new doppelgänger from the beginning. **
> 
> **If this isn't for you - if you don't like that premise, don't like what I'm trying to do with the story, or would just prefer something else - I won't ask you to stick with it. But if you _are_ one of the aforementioned people who might be interested in this kind of a story, please get the same enjoyment reading this as I got out of writing it, and please let me know what you think. I write these stories for everyone else - to give them a glimpse into the kind of world that I thought might be cool to see in the show - and hearing about how I'm doing with that really helps me to grow as a writer. **
> 
> **Okay.**
> 
> **Now that we've gotten that super long Author's Note out of the way, please enjoy this story and stay tuned for the end notes to see what songs were on constant replay while I worked on this chapter!**

_A lake with no fish,  
Is the heart of a horse,  
Named Cold Air,  
Who, when young,  
Would run like a storm,  
They would say._

\- Mitski, _A Horse Named Cold Air_

****

11

There’s a town in Virginia where the sun never sets. And this is the hair that falls down her back; it’s long, like a rippling waterfall. Thick, like her sister’s, not braided. A suitcase is lying beneath her. It’s latches gleam silver and bronze. Once, a cat lived with them, a lithe gray cat with rust-colored stripes and eyes like a forest in summer. Katherine had let her name it, and she had been young, so she’d called the alley cat Monday. _Because that’s when we found him,_ she’d said. By Wednesday, the cat had been dead. _Things will be better for us,_ Katherine’d told her, as they buried the cat in Uncle Ric’s garden. _I hope that you understand that. Someday,_ she’d told her, _you will._

Elena wonders if sometime is yesterday, today, tomorrow. Rolling underneath them like the road. The car smells like metal, and the air is too hot. They’re in the _South,_ Katherine had told her. _Virginia_. It makes her want cold lemonade. _We’ll be safe here,_ Katherine had said. Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie. 

****

19

She sits on the edge of his bed. He doesn’t look like he did when he was a kid - that’s what she thinks of him, then. She wishes that he’d grow his hair out again. She thinks it looked better that way. In person, it probably would. There is whiskey inside her, vervain. Alaric’s idea, and she’s kept it. There’s no point in goading the shadows. And he gives her everything, anyways, so long as it’s not what she wants.

After all, he had let them leave early.

They had broken the rules on the ride to the old boarding house. He had thrown her into his arms and just _ran_ , kicking his shoes to the dark of the beckoning woods. _The forest,_ she’d been told to call it, back in the days she was young. It had been raining, and so she had opened her mouth. The rain in Virginia fell loud, like an ancient drum beat in the sky, but she had still heard the sound that he made when he looked for too long at the place where her pulse thrummed in her. _I should go,_ he had told her, tossing her onto the bed. _Fine,_ she had said, _But I won’t_. And, still, she is not a liar.

“You didn’t leave,” Damon says. 

He smells, also, like whiskey. Other things, too, she thinks now - because she is thinking about it, and knows that he’s going to let her. He smells like cherry wood, the way that the leaves will tomorrow. She is smiling, now, like a fool, and she knows that he thinks she’s so _young_. That’s how he says it. _You’re so_ young, _Elena, too_ young.

Everyone’s too young for him. 

“Of course I didn’t,” She tells him, “I think that we need to talk.” 

“We don’t need to talk,” Damon says. “You,” He tells her, “Need to sleep.” 

“I’m not five,” Says Elena, and he looks at her then like the very first time that they met. ( _I know your secret,_ she’d told him. _Katherine told you,_ he’d said.) As if she is beautiful, rare, and more than a bit of a fool. 

“Will you sleep if I stay?” Damon asks. 

“What if I don’t want to sleep?” 

“Elena -”

“Shut up,” She tells him, “And touch me.” 

She flinches away from the soft, calloused pads of his fingers, and Damon stills to hold her while she cries. 

****

11

The house isn’t theirs, but Katherine says it will do. _Who owns it?_ she’d asked her, and Katherine had shaken her head. The woman was pretty, she’d noticed. Carroty, red over white. Her neck had snapped like a pencil balled into somebody’s fist. But before Katherine did it, she caught the words she had said. _Jenna,_ she’d told her, _Thank you for keeping her safe_. She takes the top bedroom, with the pretty bright curtains and the lamp that casts dim, yellowed light. And Katherine comes to tuck her in, her lips and her chin stained bright crimson.

 _I love you,_ she’d told her, _I’m sorry that we had to leave_. 

_I want to be like you,_ She’d said. 

_No,_ Katherine’d told her, _You don’t._

****

12

Elena gets nothing but strange looks she wears like a bracelet and the notes that she passes to Bonnie. The Bennett’s are witches, Katherine had said, but she hadn’t said it unkindly, as if Elena should stay away; so, when Bonnie had told her she knew how to cheat on their tests, the girls became, suddenly, friends. Elena likes Bonnie’s father: he lets Bonnie talk to her mother as much as she wants to, and makes them real food for dinner, unlike Katherine, who thinks she can make something edible out of rabbit meat, jelly, and mayonnaise. _You look good,_ Bonnie tells her, the first time she looks in a mirror. _Do you want me to give you a haircut?_.

When Elena gets home that night, Katherine slaps her. _People will notice you now,_ Katherine says. So that night, for the first time in years - though how could she honestly say that? - Elena Pierce cries ’til the pillow goes wet with her tears. Below her, Katherine drank. 

****

14

Stefan is gossamer, soft lines that she knows can kill. She hates the way he pretends that he doesn’t know what he is. Hates all the sweaters he wears. She knows that he looks at her strangely and will not attempt to say why. Once he tells Katherine that he knows she’ll look like her, when she’s grown - _Unless you turn her,_ he’d said, and at that, her sister’d gone silent. So when it’s suggested that she take the job Stefan offers - cleaning the boarding house, cooking them meals - Elena finds herself hesitant. But Katherine’d told her she needed to do this. It was important for her to know what to run from, she’d said. Important to know her own weakness. Not that she needed to, really. Katherine doesn’t control her. It’s easier to remember she’s human, now that the others are gone. _What others?_ Katherine would ask her, whenever she started to falter. _I’m your family now_.

 _Then I want a different family,_ Elena would think to herself. 

(She wishes it wouldn’t be Stefan.)

The Salvatore boarding house is the oldest building in town. _They’re a founding family,_ Elena remembers, lifting the cadenced knocker. It hits with a dull metal ring. She wonders how long he’ll make her wait, and she looks at the house as she does it, tracing the remains of people that she can see holed up in the walls. _How many people have lived here?_ She wonders, _And how many of them stayed dead?_

( _Everyone dies,_ Katherine’d told her. _Sometimes it just doesn’t stick._ )

“What are you waiting out here for?” Asks a man in a black leather jacket. He has higher cheekbones than Stefan does. His eyes are too blue for his face, but maybe, she thinks, just maybe not too blue for winter. 

“Will you let me in?” Asks Elena. The man who is not Stefan blinks. 

“Who are you?” He asks her, his voice dropping low, “And how do you know about me?” 

“I’m Elena,” She tells him, “My sister said asking’s polite.” 

“Do you live with her?” He asks, “Your… sister?” 

“Yes,” She tells him, “Katherine.” 

“By all means, then,” He tells her - and does she imagine the tremulous pain in his voice when he says it, the way that his knuckles clenched tight, the way he’s turned white like the corpse he’d once been on the road? - “Elena. Come in.” 

****

18

Before Mystic Falls there was Boston. Before Boston, Phoenix; Salt Lake. Before all of that there’s a time that she can’t remember. When, she supposes, their parents were there, not just staring up out of the blurred, tattered photograph lines. She wasn’t allowed to look at her mother - Katherine’d told her that she hadn’t wanted them there. _That’s_ why they spent their time moving. Elena feels restless just thinking about them, those years with their days and their hours, when, on the flip of a dime, Katherine would drag her away. Before they had stayed with Alaric, Elena’d not minded at all. But there is one version of her that knows all that she’s left behind, and knows that it’s still in the two-room apartment in which they had stayed those slim months. Alaric had told her she looked like her mother. He’d never once hit her for daring to ask for her name.

****

17

“You’ll never offend me,” She tells him - not just because she’s compelled. _It’s your fault,_ Elena thinks, _You who offered to try_. Damon, as always, resisted.

“You’re lying,” He tells her, “I know the place you were raised.” 

He doesn’t, she thinks, but Elena won’t ever say it. He hadn’t been there when everything was uncertain; eating and sleeping and feeling as if she were loved. He wasn’t there when Katherine said what she was - because, unlike him, she had never needed to hear it. Without new instructions, she feels what the compulsion is. It’s the sweetness her sister says comes from taking a fresh pull, like his fangs have sunk into her mind. It’s making her weak in the knees. 

(Also, she wants to kiss him, which, again, she won’t say.) 

“Can I think about it?” She asks. 

Damon looks downwards, in shame. Stefan said this isn’t like him, that even when they were children, Damon was never ashamed. He says it’s something Elena brings out, which she doesn’t like thinking of. And though she knows that it is wrong, she’s glad that she makes him feel guilty. It tells her just that he cares. It _hurts_ when she feels Damon pull from her, worse than when she was compelled. _Is that what it’s like?_ she thinks, _Being immortal?_ Suddenly, she wants to ask. But Katherine once told her that you never asked things of them. _We don’t lie,_ Katherine’d said, _And we don’t like to sugarcoat things. So before you ask something of our kind, know if you’re ready to break_. 

Elena’s not ready to break, but she does want to fall into Damon; feel his arms come up around her and make the whole world seem alright. It isn’t his nature, she tells herself, turning her head from his gaze. She cannot stand seeing that look on his face, anymore. It’s her least favorite Damon, apart from the Damon who’s sad “I’m sorry,” He tells her, after an infinite moment, “For -” “It’s my fault,” She says, and it is. She is the one who asked him to do it. She’d wanted to know what it felt like, the power her sister so loved. The one that drove her to kill. 

“That’s not what I meant,” Damon says, “I’m not saying sorry for _me_ , Elena. I’m saying sorry for Katherine.” 

The room is hazy with cigarette smoke and the vestiges of last night’s whiskey. Damon always drinks whiskey. It’s amber and honest, like him. A little bit dangerous, too. 

“Why would you need to do that?” 

“Because you’re not meant to be here,” He tells her, “And Katherine already knows.” “She wants me safe,” Says Elena. She sees him grow guarded, shift on his laurels, retreat. His face is more beautiful angry, especially when she isn’t the person who’s caused it. His eyes go that one shade of blue that she _likes_. The night’s coming out in full splendor, and she realizes jolting-ly that she’s been here all day. Katherine must be so _worried_. “She said that it has to be this.” 

“Do you believe her?” He asks. 

“She’s my sister,” She tells him, and sees a wince creeping up. Damon is young, for a vampire. Pretty, too, for a man. If Elena believed he was human she’d almost feel sorry for him. But Katherine proved long ago that some things are known and not felt. Love, she had told her, was one. Was that why she’d asked him to do it? Or was it because of how badly she wants to feel like she’s part of their world? Elena cannot rightly say. 

Someday, though, she wants to. 

“She isn’t your sister,” Says Damon, “Don’t ever say that again.” 

She feels the compulsion come over her then like a wave. It seeps straight into her bones. She understands, now, why Katherine does it. There’s no feeling like this. Nothing she knows can compare. _You don’t really love him,_ she thinks. 

“I have to call Katherine,” She tells him, punch-drunk and reeling from it. “She thinks I went over to Matt’s.” 

His scowl tightens like that, and his quickness makes her too sure. 

“Does she believe you?” Asks Damon. 

“No,” Says Elena, “That would be stupid of her.” 

There, in the dark, Damon grins. 

****

17

She cannot remember the last time that she felt at peace. It must have been when she was younger, before. Before she met Katherine, perhaps. Before Katherine heard about her. _It isn’t important now,_ thinks Elena, staring at what could be her. The stake was placed well, at the very core of her heart. It’s beating was slow to begin with, but now, she knows, it is silent. No one moves forward to pull the wood out of the body, and so Elena does, shaking. Katherine feels no different dead than she had when she was alive - but then again, Elena remembers, she never knew Katherine alive. No one knew Katherine alive. She looks like just one more dead girl, but also, she looks like the woman who let her pick radio stations, who let her take _Advil_ with chamomile tea when she had to stay home with a fever. Who taught her how to be safe in the world, if she wanted to know what it _really_ meant, being alive. _Katherine_ , thinks Elena, _You’re not supposed to be dead_.

( _I already was dead,_ Elena can hear Katherine say.)

“You alright?” Stefan asks her. He says it the same way that he had once told her that nobody needed to know. 

“No,” She tells him, “I’m not.” 

Stefan doesn’t accept it, but she doesn’t think that’s a problem. 

“Where did you learn it?” She asks him, “Staking one of your own?” 

“Damon taught me,” He says. 

“Where did he learn it?” She asks him. 

“Your sister,” Says Stefan, “Let’s go.” 

****

15

“She took you away from your parents,” He says, and now everything is a struggle.

“We don’t have parents,” She tells him, “It’s always been Katherine and I.”

“ _Katherine_ ,” Damon says, “Turned me. How do you still not believe that?” 

“Because,” She says, “It’s not true.” 

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie. 

****

14

“How old are you?” Damon asks. His eyes are a hooded cacophony. He smells of allspice and leather, the alcohol that he prefers. Elena’s never had alcohol - Katherine says she’s too young. And so she tells him,

“Eighteen?” 

He throws his head back and laughs. 

“Nice try,” He says, “Try again.” 

She brushes him off. Surely his brother is somewhere, waiting for her to show up.

“You do know that he doesn’t want you,” He says, “You’re a _child_. You’re -” He seems to choke, then, strangely, on air. “How do you know about Katherine?” 

“She’s my sister,” She tells him, “Why wouldn’t I know about her?” 

“Look,” Says Damon, “What are you here for again?” 

“Your brother asked me to clean.” 

“We have maids for that,” Damon says, and pushes her a lucid fifth of bourbon. “We’re starting with this. If you hate it - which you will - then your _sister_ shouldn’t get angry.” 

Elena stares at the liquid. She takes a gulp and _chokes_ \- properly, not like he had. It _burns._

“That,” Damon tells her, “Is how your sister made me feel.”

“What did she do?” Asks Elena. 

“I’ll tell you,” He says, “When you’re older.” 

Elena looks down at her fingers, laced in her lap and painted in green, and finds that she thinks she can wait. 

****

16

Katherine looks like the devil. That’s what Elena hears Tuesday. She is wearing the jeans that her sister found inside the trunk, the long-sleeved shirt that hides all the places she’s bitten. Elena combs her hair straight. She still isn’t used to the way that it grazes her shoulders as soft as Katherine’s fangs pierce. School’s far enough that Elena leaves early. Katherine said she should walk.

And then Damon tells her, 

“Get in.” 

He drives something classy, she knows, and he’s waiting for her in the street.  
“How did you know?” She asks him, eventually, “That I-” 

“You looked scared,” He says, scowling, “Like I used to look, when she -”

“When she what?” Asks Elena. 

“Forget it.” He sneaks a glance at her and she flinches from what she can see. He’s looking at her affectionately, almost tenderly, and he, too, has woken up early. She cannot smell drink on his breath. “Elena,” He asks her, more gently, “Why don’t you wear vervain?” 

“Katherine won’t let me,” She says, and finds her hands moving of their own accord to the edge of her crisp ironed sleeve. In the mirror, his jaw goes tight. 

“I see,” Damon says, “I’ll be talking with her about that.” 

“You don’t - it’s fine,” Says Elena. “I mean. Katherine’s my sister. I _like_ to be useful to her.” 

She feels when he slams on the brakes. It hits her as if she’s been slapped. 

“You’re not being _useful_ ” he says, “you’re a _child_ and you’re being _used_. What the _fuck_ does she think that she’s doing?” 

“I don’t know,” Says Elena. She can tell that she’s going to sob, and fights to keep in the tears. “Can we - I can’t be late on the first day of school.” 

“You can’t be with her,” Damon says, “So I’m -”

“No,” Says Elena, “I want to be with my sister. I don’t want to see you again.”

“That’s too bad,” Damon tells her, “You do work for us, Elena.” 

“I work for your brother. Not you.” 

She notices then that he’s stopped them because they’ve arrived, and everyone’s streaming in through the the double glass doors. That’s the tide she must swim with. She wonders which ones of them Katherine will kill when she’s bored. 

“Thank you,” She says, “For the ride.” 

“You’re polite,” Damon tells her. 

“Why shouldn’t I be?” Asks Elena. 

“Elena,” He says, “I’m a _vampire_.” 

“And?” 

“And you need to go, if you still don’t want to be late.” 

“Will I see you again?” Asks Elena. 

Damon considers, cocking his head towards her. She sees something in him that she can’t define, even more than the glint of his fangs. 

“You ask,” Damon tells her, “I come. I’m easy like that.” 

Elena smiles and slides herself out of the car. She catches one last look at Damon before she closes the door. He looks like he’s going to cry. 

****

17

Sundays are _their_ day. Elena tells Katherine that she is still working, though both of them know it’s a lie. It’s been _months_ since Katherine was burned, and the scar still falls fair on her skin. Sometimes she feels that they haven’t spoken since then - and when she thinks about that, she suddenly, blindingly hates her uncle Alaric. (And, to a lesser extent, wishes that it would burn her.) So Katherine lets her go, and she walks through the slow, dappled sunshine to get to the boarding house door. Elena still knocks after all of this time. _You don’t have to do that_ , he’d told her, sometime when she was fifteen. _I want to,_ Elena had said.

On Sundays, the city is empty, holed up in kitchens and church. There is only one church in Mystic Falls, and Elena has never gone in it, but Matt told her once - _before we kissed_ , thinks Elena - that church is a place to be quiet. But quiet unsettles Elena. Vampires move in the quiet, the dark, shadowed places that normal people cannot see. On a good day, when their fangs are stained red, they can move without making a sound. He asked her to go when her sister was found, and Elena’d politely declined. But she thinks of them, walking, sitting in pews made of leathery wood that could splinter through Damon and _stay._ Sinking onto butter-smooth benches to pray for the souls of the fallen. _Don’t waste your breath,_ she has always wanted to tell them. _Hell is real, and all of us go there someday._ Yet the words, like God’s name in Katherine’s throat, wouldn’t come out of her mouth. 

When the city is quiet, Elena can make her way faster. She could probably walk with her eyes closed, with how much she goes there of late. Things are better, now that school has let out. She no longer has to pretend that she’s ever fit in in this town. Not until August comes back. And Damon _will_ let her in, whether she asks him or not. The door is already open when Elena halts at the threshold. She has barely cleared her throat before he is there, a smirk crossing over his face. 

“Damon,” Elena asks, “May I?” 

“ _Polite_ , “Damon says, and she frowns. It’s so hard to tell what really offends him - but she need not have worried, for Damon’s hand catches her wrist, and when she looks up a smile is splitting him open. His teeth are _perfect_ , as pearly and straight as a white-picket fence. 

“May you _what?_ ” Damon asks. This is a part of their game - he likes to see how long it takes for Elena to finally, finally surrender. Of course, with Damon, it’s never exactly a _game._ More like the threat of revealing the way that he feels, which she thinks she can see in his eyes, in the scarce moments he lets his guard down. She remembers, in them, that she could be Katherine’s twin, with how closely the two look alike. _But it makes sense,_ thinks Elena, _We’re sisters_. She knows that he doesn’t believe it, but Elena knows that it’s true. 

“May I come in?” Asks Elena. 

“I thought that you’d never ask.” 

“ _Damon._ ” 

“Fine,” He says, “I invite thee.” 

There’s old magic in invitation. When Elena’s foot crosses, she feels it. The boarding house welcoming her. _Not many people would ask,_ Damon’d told her. _That makes you one of its own._ Elena can feel it sing in her blood: the boarding house wants to _protect her_. It wants to give her a roof of strong timbers, a warm place to sleep when it’s cold out that _isn’t_ inside Damon’s room - not that she’s ever been _there_. Trailing her hand on the flowery wallpaper, Elena whispers an apology, hoping the halls will forgive her. She goes for the thin silver chain before Damon can ask her and throws it off onto a chair. The vampire only glares. 

“I won’t wear vervain around you,” Says Elena, “So please, Damon, don’t even ask.” 

“You’ve grown complacent,” He says. 

“Strange, don’t you think? For someone who grew up with Katherine?” 

“I never said that,” Says Damon. 

“No,” Says Elena, “You didn’t.” 

She wonders if this is the reason he loves her, because she can’t not be herself, despite all the danger it holds. She’s drawn like a moth to the flame of his taunting. She’s only a challenge, to him. But that’s the problem with knowing him: She would rather be only a challenge to Damon than nothing to Damon at all. _Don’t love me,_ Elena thinks, _Fear me. Fear me like Katherine does._ It isn’t quite daring that pushes her onto her toes, but then, thinks Elena, it isn’t quite caring that makes Damon kiss her like that, like the whole world is ending and everything he’s ever wanted is lying there just out of reach. He is drowning his loss in a gamble that looks like the woman he loved, when loving was something he did. They won’t talk about this tomorrow - they never, _never_ do - but that’s too fine with Elena. The first thing that she ever learned about Damon was taking what she could get. The rest he will keep for himself. 

Still, she could drown in this touch. His hands are so gentle on her, and his lips so unyielding, that Elena can’t help but respond. He’s too old for her - _Younger than Katherine,_ she thinks - but it just makes him _that_ good at knowing, so that, when he pulls her away from the doorway and presses her against the wall, she prays for a moment he really has lost his humanity. The world would be better, she thinks, without morals cropping up everywhere. Leave it to Damon to make her feel living and worthless, all in the space of a breath.  
But this time - this time - Elena won’t let him escape. 

“Teach me,” She tells him, “I want to learn how to fight.”

Damon sucks in an inhale. 

“I don’t care,” Says Elena, not waiting for his interruption. “I know what you think about me. I could never hurt your kind - not since I grew up with Katherine, and let her do - hell knows what and compel me. But Damon, that’s why I _need_ you to teach me.” 

In the end, thinks Elena, it doesn’t quite matter if Damon says yes or says no. She only hopes that he knows she is desperate and wanting for something that isn’t his ichor-silk body, grasping for hers in the dark. 

****

20

She is twenty years old for the rest of the world when she learns who Isobel was. It’s not how her birthday’s _supposed to be,_ thinks Elena. She’s supposed to be outside, not puking in Alaric’s sink because she can’t bear to transition. Not that Damon’s been helpful - it’s his blood that’s in her, she knows, and she’ll never be able to look at him. So instead she vomits the not-blood and feels the fangs pushing their way through her gums like a writhing worm burrows through loam. _I don’t want to do this_ , she thinks to herself. _It’s not what I want, anymore_.

( _But you need it,_ says a voice that sounds too much like a Salvatore’s.) ( _You need it, Elena, so drink._ )

“I _can’t_.” Says Elena. They make their way in when she says it, and she tastes her own blood in her mouth, as cold and as lifeless as she is. “You killed my _mother_ , She says. 

“She’s no more dead,” Damon tells her, “Or living, than either of us. And you do need to drink soon, Elena. It’ll only get worse if you wait.” 

“I’m not killing somebody for you.” 

“You don’t have to,” He tells her, “You’ll leave the killing to me.” 

“You know what?” Says Elena, “I don’t think that I will.” 

He raises an eyebrow at her, and she knows what he’s thinking inside. That this is what Katherine must have been like when she turned. This is why she was her sister, not the mother that they don’t share. 

“Are you really going to do this?” He asks her. He’s bent low, and his jacket is off, showing the arms that she can’t. Stefan once told her they’d heal, but Elena knows better than that. Everything Katherine’d touched died - including, ironically, her. She’ll wonder about that, someday. “Because once you do this, Elena, you know you can never go back.” 

( _Why did you do it?_ She wants to ask Damon.)

“Who do you think I should kill?” 

****

16

“I want to stop school,” Says Elena.

“Do you?” Asks Katherine, “And why do you want to do that?”

“Because. It feels too mundane.” 

“It feels too _mundane_?” Katherine snaps, “If you wanted a bite, sweet sister, you only needed to ask.” 

“That’s not -” 

“It’s well enough,” Katherine says. “I’ve waited for you, did you know that? My whole life, I waited for you.” 

Her sister has a way of speaking like dull knives sheathed inside velvet. It’s driving Elena to fear. If Damon were here, he would tell her how to get away. But Elena cannot run from Katherine. Family is family, forever. Isn’t that what everyone says? When Elena was younger - in the days before Mystic Falls - she dreamed about her dark reflection, falling out of a warped mirror to pierce her throat and leave her dead where she lay. But now she sees it for what it had been. It was a memory, all. A memory she has of Katherine, moving like she’s moving now. 

“Relax,” Says her sister, “Be still. I promise you that it won’t hurt.” 

“You’re lying,” She tells her, fleetingly, grabbing for straws, “When Damon drinks from me it hurts.” 

Everything in her goes still. 

“Damon _Salvatore_?” Katherine asks. 

“I love him,” She says. She doesn’t know if it’s true, and she hopes that it’s not, but it seems like the right thing to say. 

“Elena, Elena, Elena,” Says Katherine, “You don’t understand what you’re saying.” 

She does understand, though. It’s just that she’s never felt it. 

“You don’t know him like I do,” She says. She coughs from deep in her ribs, which, she can tell, have been bruised. They will be purple tomorrow, and if she is lucky - if it is Sunday - Damon will bite his wrist and force it into her mouth while he presses his lips onto them. “He’s good,” She tells Katherine, “And pure. To me, if not anyone else. And that’s better than you think him capable of. He’s more _human_ than you are. You’ll never be _human_ like him. How many times did you do it, Katherine? How much have you taken from me?” 

“My sweet sister. I’ve taken _everything_.” 

_No,_ thinks Elena, _Not everything. You cannot take what I am._ And neither, she knows, can Damon. She says it not out of knowing what loving feels like, but because she knows he won’t try. He has only stayed with her once, and that was because she had asked. (Though she can’t honestly say that she _doesn’t_ dream about Damon, every night he isn’t there.)

“You have no claim over me.” 

“And what will you do about that?”

“I’ll go somewhere else,” Says Elena. “I know there are still people here who wouldn’t let your kind in.” 

Katherine hisses, recoils. 

“You don’t honestly think that,” She tells her, “You _know_ that there isn’t a door in this town that would not yield for my need.” 

“You don’t _honestly_ think I’ve forgotten the lessons you gave?” Says Elena, “You want everyone here to love you, but there are still some who remember. _Their_ doors won’t yield for you.” 

“And who would those be?” Croons out Katherine, “The Founders? They’re too _scared_ of me to refuse.” 

“Then I’ll do it myself,” Says Elena. 

A pendant hangs from a thin silver chain on her neck. Touching it, she finds it warm. 

****

17

He sponges Katherine’s blood off of her with a rag soaked in water and brandy. It’s easier, he said, than showering. Besides, he will not let her fall. He works the sponge with a firmness on her, and, when she squirms underneath it, he does not correct her behavior. _It’s too soon,_ thinks Elena, _To feel this way about you_. Every time that she closes her eyes she sees Katherine lying there dead. The moonlight made her olive skin pallid. Elena thinks she’ll be sick, but her limbs are too cold. Her chest is too weary to heave. And her hair, her clothing, is sticky with Katherine’s blood. She wonders why he doesn’t drink it.

He drags the rag over her stomach, down past her hips and her thighs. He swirls it around her ankles, staining the once-t-shirt pink. The alcohol stings where it hits her, though Elena knows she’s not bleeding. Still, she whimpers, and Damon presses a kiss onto the crest of her hair. 

“I’m sorry,” He tells her. She doesn’t know if he’s speaking to her or himself. 

“It isn’t you fault,” Says Elena, “It was -” 

“Stefan’s,” Says Damon, and, when she looks down in shame, “ _Elena._ Do _not_ say that you think it’s _yours_.” 

“It is, though,” She tells him, “It is.” 

“Someday,” He tells her, “I’ll ask you to say why that is.”

“But tonight?” Asks Elena. 

“Tonight, your sister is dead. And you - Elena. I need you to tell me. _Tell me_ that you’ll be alright.” 

“It was Katherine,” She says. She knows it sounds plaintive - yet it was _Katherine_. It _was_. And before she knows how to stop it, Elena is using her voice. “I was - I have this memory, Damon. I was seven years old, and we were living - with somebody else. Somebody who knew our mother. There was a park at the end of the street, back by the old senior center. We went there, sometimes, so Katherine could be alone. And she would - she would push me, on the swings. I _remember_ her pushing me, and - and _smiling_ at me. She told people I was her sister. That she - she - It _is_ my fault, Damon, okay?” 

Damon does not look at her. But she feels him do _something_ that, like Elena, makes noise. His chest is moving, up and down and up and down again. _But that isn’t right_ thinks Elena, _You don’t need to breathe, you’re a -_

“You’re crying,” Elena says, “Aren’t you. Did I -” 

“It’s not you,” Damon tells her, “It’s not.” 

“It’s Katherine,” Says Elena. 

“She was your sister,” He tells her, “That’s more important right now.” 

It is, she realizes, looking at him. Damon is _worried_ about her. 

“I-” 

“It’s okay,” Damon tells her. His voice is a little bit hoarse - because, really, it’s not in the slightest. But neither of them need to say it. Not when they already know. 

“You should probably stop,” Says Elena. 

“Why?” Damon asks her. 

“Because,” She says. Swallows. “I think you might hate me tomorrow.” 

“Elena,” Says Damon, “You just lost the closest thing you ever had to a family. How could I hate you for that?” 

She blinks. Gathers the courage to do it. _Just do it, Elena. Just do it_. But love isn’t easy, and there are far too many kinds. Who’s to say that the kind she feels now could ever suffice to save her? What will it mean if she tries? 

( _I didn’t come here for Katherine, Elena. I’ve only come here for you._ )

( _My sister says it’s polite._ )

( _I’ll tell you when you’re older_ )

“I want you to tell me,” She says, “Or I want you to make me forget.” 

“Excuse me?” He asks her, “What do you mean, ‘ _Make you forget_ ’?” 

“I mean,” Says Elena, “Compel me. Just like you do with the women. Make me forget that I ever knew someone named Katherine. Let me be happy, or let me know why I can’t be. That’s why you’re going to hate me.” 

“You’re right,” Damon tells her, “I would hate you for that. What will you do if I don’t?” 

“I don’t think that you want to know.” 

Damon’s eyes flash like coins on a string in the sun. 

“What the _hell_ \- “ 

“It means that you don’t want to know,” Says Elena, pushing herself from his hold. Her skin’s erupted in goosebumps. She can barely keep herself up. And Damon is _Damon_ , so _Damon_. Why is he always so _Damon_ (Katherine _turned me. How do you still not believe that?_ )

“I don’t think you want this,” He tells her. 

“How would you know what I want?” 

“I knew her,” He tells her, “Your sister. Better than you ever did. And you have to trust me when I say you’re nothing like her. This - this is something that _Katherine_ would want you to do. That’s how I know you don’t want it.” 

“Fuck you,” Elena says. “Fuck you, Damon. You have no _clue_ what I want.”

She is backing away from him, feeling the floor shift for her. But then it _pushes_ , and she falls her way onto it, trying and failing to catch herself. _Katherine felt this_ she thinks. _She fell just like this when she died_. But Damon was not there to stop it, the way that he has done for her. She is an inch from the floorboards or less, close enough for their dust to tickle her nostrils and force her, almost, to sneeze. Damon is _strong_ \- as strong as Katherine was, but not in a way that could ever make her accept. _There is no acceptance_ , she thinks. 

And Damon Salvatore knows it. 

“I’m older,” She tells him, “I’m older.” 

“You’re grieving,” Says Damon, “You know I can’t do this to you.” 

“Which one?” Elena asks. 

“Either.” 

And it comes to her, then, like his smell comes to her in her dreams. The press of him on her in ways that she knows she can’t want.

“Then maybe,” She tells him, “Do both.” 

****

85

They go to bars in the summer. In every city there’s nothing to do but roll down the windows and feel the humid mid-morning. Elena isn’t a daylighter - she didn’t want that, she’d told Damon, once, and he had agreed with her on it. She got in too much trouble anyways, Damon had told her, without making dares with the sun. So instead, Elena Salvatore watches. The world moves too slowly, now that she knows how to run. ( _You’ve been running for sixty-five years,_ thinks Elena, _What do you have to lose now_?) She cannot tell him how close she has come to sticking her hand through and feeling the way that it chars. She is too ashamed to admit that she wishes that she could do something, anything, that Damon cannot forgive her.

She thinks he forgives her too much. Remembers the way that he took her, pried her fangs out of the corpse. Remembers them digging together, the way that his muscles had worked, how good it had tasted, how much she had wanted to share. ( _Don’t worry_ he’d said. _We have time_ )

****

16,

She is sixteen years old when Stefan first tries to kiss her. She doesn’t know what she should say. Any girl would be happy with Stefan - he is brooding, melancholic, colored of caramel and cream. But Elena wants thrill and a rush, not the way Stefan’s hands feel. She hadn’t been looking at him when he did it - she’d been bent to the stove, attending an omelette which, by now, will have burned.

“Careful,” He’d told her, “You’re getting too close to the heat.” 

“I know,” She had told him. It was an effort to keep her voice neutral - Stefan has always unnerved her far more than Damon could do. He cannot control himself well. All the years that he’s spent avoiding makes him too prone to violence. And he does not like to stay still. He is restless, like Katherine is. He is needy and clingy, impatient, and none of it is a show. He is, also, aggressive. It hides in him like a snake with leisurely canines, ready to strike at the first sign of wariness, doubt. Though how her cooking could ever be perceived as wariness, Elena can’t honestly say. Still, he backs her into the oven, and the lip of it digs in to leave a red line. She can’t put her elbows down; the burner is still going hot. 

“Elena,” He tells her, “I’m sorry for being this - thing. But I only have eyes for you.” And he only has lips for her. He is going onto her neck, and she still hasn’t pushed him away. As if she could, thinks Elena. Stefan’s a _vampire_ , just like her sister. Katherine showed her again yesterday what it means to be human and weak, and Stefan is showing her now. His hands are too cold - he doesn’t like holding hot cups. He likes to pretend he can breathe. 

“Elena,” He says, “Let me do this. No - open your eyes, let me _do this_.” 

“I don’t want it,” She tells him. Her eyes are too shut for compulsion, but she feels Stefan prowling at her, trying to find his way in. His fingertips are on her eyelids, trying to push them apart. Elena was frozen, but now she is not. _You can fight us the way we fight you,_ Katherine’d told her, the only time that she’d asked. Elena remembers and _bites_. Stefan’s blood tastes too sour, like limeade that doesn’t have sugar. It’s hard for her to choke down. But she keeps her teeth locked in his arm and he yowls, just like an animal, wounded. Soon the pressure is gone. Elena tumbles, slides to the floor. Her shirt-sleeve is torn, and she sees the scars Katherine’s left, peppering up her like freckles and star charts pulled taut. There is somebody hovering over her, and Elena sighs out in relief. _It’s Damon,_ she thinks, _It’s just Damon. Damon can’t hurt me, he wouldn’t._ But in the next moment, Elena regrets thinking that. He’s tilting her chin to him sharply, with more force than she had imagined. He doesn’t ask anything of her, but Elena can see what he’s careful with. Damon is furious. Angry like she hasn’t seen. It’s flowing off of him in waves, perfuming the air with something she thinks might be need. 

“It’s alright,” Says Elena, “You can let go of me now.” 

Damon nods curtly at her. 

“I’ll fix it,” He tells her, “I’ll deal with him, ‘Lena, okay?” 

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie. 

( _Katherine_ , she thinks, _Calls me that_ )

****

49

Elena still drinks human blood when she carves her name into the rail. It’s a handsome wood railing, and Elena’s fangs are too sharp. It’s a tradition, Katherine once told her, when she decided Elena should know, that you wrote your name down in wood on the stairs of the places you leave. The pain of the splinters piercing the essence of deadness is more benediction than gift. It’s thanking the houses for all of the suffering you’ve put them through - it is funny, she thinks, that it takes the shape of fierce maiming. Katherine had said it would hurt - and, for once, she’d been honest.

Elena feels like somebody’s stabbing her gums. Her mouth goes sandpaper dry, and her body convulses with the struggle of keeping her focus. She wishes that she could run. _I’ll need them sharp,_ thinks Elena. _I shouldn’t be doing this now_. The railing bears other names, though not, Elena know, Katherine’s. She did not leave here by choice, and, again, wasn’t wrong. 

Elena has seen names before, a long time before they came here. _Isobel Saltzman_ , crudely done in the North Stairs of Alaric’s complex. She must have been young, then, and not had control over it. It’s the only thing that explains how the letters had jumped like arithmetic, twirling and twisting into what wasn’t quite English because of their irregularity. She wishes that she had a picture of it - more than this memory, fickle and coarse, of the mother that she should have known. _Parents want better,_ Katherine’d once said, _For their children._ Elena can’t know if she’s done it, but she can give Isobel this: 

She will carve her name here so that it can be read. So that every person who comes to this house will know that Elena was here; Elena, who used to write journals and think she’d be somebody else. Who was never allowed to be innocent, never allowed to be free. She will trap a part of her soul in this house; and, when in decades, it crumbles, she will come to the forest she knows will reclaim it and carve it again on a tree. So that her past, however it was, will never be left behind.  
Her mother would have proud of her, Alaric says. But it isn’t what Katherine would do. 

****

6

When Elena is six, she overhears Uncle Ric talking to Katherine about her. It isn’t the first time that she’s overheard, but it’s the first time she takes any interest. She wants to cling onto Isobel just as if she were Katherine. She remembers no one but Katherine and Uncle Ric, the woman they stayed with in Phoenix who had a long cornflower mane. The first voice that she knew was Katherine’s, and Katherine’s voice is a steel one. Full of conviction to be what she needs for Elena - or, she’ll think later, herself. Katherine is warm, like a blanket. Katherine is soft, like the snow. Katherine is where Elena belongs, but Isobel’s who she wants.

****

17

“Both,” Damon tells her, “You think that I should do both.”

“Yes,” Says Elena. “I think that you should do both.” 

“I could kill you,” He tells her, “You do realize that, don’t you? I could snap your neck without blinking.” 

“You could,” She says, “But you won’t.”

“Wouldn’t I?” Damon asks her. “Don’t be so sure about that. Have you any idea how you look?” 

“No,” Says Elena, “So _tell me_.” 

“Elena,” He tells her, “Please. Don’t make me do this.”

“My sister is dead,” Says Elena, “Can’t you just do it for her?” 

“For Katherine,” He asks her, “For _Katherine?_ Why on _Earth_ would I do it for Katherine? Kathrine tortured me for a hundred and forty-five years. I don’t owe _Katherine_ anything.” 

“Do it for me, then,” She tells him, “Since I don’t have anyone now.” 

“Is that what you think?” Damon asks her. His voice has gone into a frequency she can’t decipher, brimming with hesitance, longing, and - yes, she catches it - sadness. Not for himself, but for her. Sadness that he cannot save her. _But you can_ , thinks Elena, _You can_. 

“I loved her,” He tells her. 

“I know,” Says Elena. 

“Does that bother you?” Damon asks. 

Elena breathes in the boarding house. Feels the walls that have given her shelter telling her it’ll be fine. Thinks about how the floor became soft that day she was sixteen, and every day that’s come since. (Thinks about Damon’s hands on her body. His lips on her lips. His tongue on her bruises. His deft fingers braiding her hair.) 

“No,” Says Elena, standing up straighter to look at him right where it hurts. “That doesn’t bother me, Damon. Not if you don’t anymore.” 

Damon kisses her, then. 

Elena thinks that it’s _lovely_. 

****

15

Elena is fifteen when Alaric moves into town. Katherine, as always, knows first. _He’ll be teaching you history,_ Katherine had said. _I don’t want to hear you went near him. I’m hardly you,_ Elena had thought. _I don’t like to chase people down._ But she knows that her sister is right. Her palm is clammy, knocking on his office door. She can’t tell what she’ll be more in trouble for: Skipping class, or visiting Alaric after. (She hasn’t asked Damon about it. Can’t really think why it matters. _It doesn’t_ , she makes herself think. It is almost like self-compulsion.)

“Mr Saltzman?” She asks, through the door. It’s laced through with tonic, a mixture of vervain and garlic that nearly makes Elena laugh. “Would you mind it if I came in?” 

“It’s fine,” Says Alaric. He is scrutinizing an essay when Elena rotates the doorknob - which, too, is redolent with vervain, heady and slick as black oil. “ _Katherine?_ ” He asks, seeing her.

“Elena, actually. The garlic’s a nice touch, I think.” 

She hadn’t realized how nervous she was until now. To see him again, the man who had once been - not quite her father, exactly, but not really anything else. Alaric’s house was the longest, ’til Katherine moved them both here. She still doesn’t know what that means. They never talked much when Elena was young - Katherine kept them apart - but she’d always felt Alaric’s eyes on her, watching her like a father would watch his young girl. Like he thought that she’d be someone, someday, who he wouldn’t have need to stake. Elena never said thank you for that, and she knows that she shouldn’t start now. If Alaric loved her, he knows. 

“You’ve grown up,” Alaric tells her. Time is going, again. It buzzes in her left ear like a gunshot. “You look... More like your sister than I had expected.” 

“I get that a lot,” Says Elena, “People thinking I’m Katherine.” 

“Really?” He asks her, “Like who?” 

Elena looks back at the door. 

“I don’t want to talk about that.” 

“Of course,” Says Alaric, “I’m sorry. I just - I thought it was a coincidence.” 

“Why?” Asks Elena, “If you already knew about us?” 

“Because,” Says Alaric, “I’d hoped that you’d gotten away.” 

“From what, Mr. Saltzman?” She asks him. 

“From Katherine,” He tells her, “Your sister.” 

“Right,” Says Elena, “Right.” And then - though what possesses her now she can’t say - “I did. Katherine not with me right now. She doesn’t know that I’m here.” 

“Oh?” Says Alaric, “Is that going to get me in trouble?” 

“Not if I leave and go back.” 

“That seems unfortunate,” Alaric says. 

“That’s why I think - I think that I won’t,” Says Elena. “I have somewhere else I can go.” 

Alaric raises an eyebrow. 

“I have friends,” She says, “Friends that aren’t like she is.” 

“But you don’t want to go to them, do you?” 

Alaric’s smiling just like a father would smile. Like _Elena’s_ father had smiled, if he was a father at all. He wears the same ring as Damon. It doesn’t suit him as well. 

“No,” Says Elena, “I don’t. Do you know the old Salvatore boarding house? That’s where I want to go.” ( _You remind me of her,_ says Alaric, letting her off at the curb. _Your mother. I’m sure that she’d love you, you know._ ) 

_****_

21

This is the deal that they’ve made: Damon lets her ask what she wants to, and, in turn, she doesn’t ask him why she feels like he’d wanted her dead. _No holds barred_ , he had told her, and Elena had found herself hating herself in that moment, hating her sick, pitied body for daring to make Damon weak. _I’d do anything for her,_ she’d heard him tell Alaric, when, to her best guess, she had barely just woken up. They’d been too far away, and that’s how she should have known. But all she had been was relieved.

They don’t talk about staying, or Stefan, or the myriad things that Elena knows they still need to. They do not talk about Caroline snarling, her pretty pale skin going veined. They do not talk about whatever it means to be sired, and she gets the sense that he’d stake her if she tried to ask. 

(Katherine, she thinks, would have _loved_ it.) 

****

14

“I don’t even know what you want me to do,” Says Elena. It seems like what Katherine’d call prescient. Ergo, thinks Elena, a ruse. Work is always worse when Stefan is home. He makes up meaningless tasks to keep Elena there later; it’s only when she insists that her sister is angry he finally allows her to go. She wishes that it was as easy to leave as it is to come in; that, by saying it, she could find herself outside his door and safe from the leer on his face that she sees when he thinks she’s not looking. Damon had warned about it, and she wonders, if she told him, what he would do. _They’re brothers_ , Elena reminds herself, then, _And Damon was right, you’re a child. I’m sure that it’s nothing. It must be._ These are the lies that she tells herself on the nights when she thinks she won’t sleep.

(They are always, always punctured by the sound of Katherine’s fangs.)

“Have you done the upstairs yet?” He asks her.

“Twice.” 

“Third time’s the charm,” Stefan tells her, “I’m going out to get food. Do you want me to grab anything?” 

“No,” Says Elena, “I have to be home by dinner.” 

“I’ll call her,” He says, “You can stay.” 

“I -” 

“It’s fine,” Stefan says, “Honestly. I don’t want you to go yet. I’ll even pay you for it.” He flashes a grin that she wishes he wouldn’t and darts out the door like - well, she supposes, just like a vampire would. She uses his leave of absence as an excuse to check the time. If the Salvatore’s weren’t as allergic to clocks as they seem to be with mirrors, it might even be easy for her. But the only clock Elena’s seen is inside of Damon’s room, and something about it seems _wrong_ to her, as if, by looking, Elena’d be breaking his trust. She wasn’t lying to Stefan, though - she _does_ need to be home by dinner - and the windows are too high for Elena to look without grabbing a chair from the parlor. She doesn’t want to clean this floor again. 

So, with a gulp of nerves, she pushes aside Damon’s door. She is seized by the urge to stand there and wait, like she does when she gets here for work, and discards it. This _matters_ , she thinks. More than a vampire’s privacy. Never mind that he hasn’t yet let her clean it. 

Damon’s room is impeccable. That’s what she latches onto. Everything has a place. It looks like he’s lived here for centuries, and he hasn’t even lived two. The bed is large enough for whoever he wants to be with him, and, for an instant, Elena envies him that. Though it’s been made as if he’s never used it, she knows that he’s shared it before. It’s just the way she thinks he is. The clock, consequently, is carved out of fine bone or ivory, with swirling Roman numerals done up in some sort of faux-cursive scrawl. Elena has to squint to make out the numbers. 

“It’s five thirty-six,” Says a simmering voice from behind her, “So much for polite, then, Ms. Pierce.” 

“I’m not Ms. Pierce,” Says Elena, “Katherine’s the one who’s a Pierce.” 

“I thought you were sisters,” Says Damon. 

“We are,” She tells him, “It’s just that I’m not a Pierce.” 

“Mm. And - Why did I find you sneaking into my bedroom?”

“I needed to know what time it was,” Says Elena. “Why don’t you have other clocks?”

“I wasn’t aware that we needed them,” Damon says. “Why don’t you have a smartphone?” 

“My sister’s insane,” Says Elena. She can tell, then, that Damon’s surprised. He wasn’t expecting Elena to joke. He was expecting her, she realizes, to be scared. It makes her immeasurably happy she’s not. 

“I live with her,” She reminds him, “You can’t intimidate me.” 

“You’re fourteen,” He says, “I’m a hundred and forty-two. I can intimidate you just fine.” 

( _Not as much as I can_ , thinks Elena, _Seeing as I look like Katherine_.)

“What did you need the time for, anyways?” Damon asks her, “Weren’t you finished with cleaning an hour ago?” 

“No,” She says, “Your brother told me to redo all of the rooms. His exact words were ‘Third time’s the charm.’” 

“Oh,” He says, “Carry on.” 

“ _Bastard_."

She says it under her breath, but not quite enough he can’t hear it. He’s staring at her incredulously, and Elena can feel herself blush. 

“Elena,” He asks her, “Did you just call me a bastard?”

She’ll clean. The faster she cleans, the sooner she can get the hell out of this house. 

“I didn’t know that you swore,” Damon tells her, “Does Katherine know about that?” 

“Leave me alone,” Says Elena, “I have to be home by dinner.” 

“You’re working,” Says Damon. 

“That doesn’t mean anything.” 

Elena sounds - frightened. She doesn’t know why. There’s nothing for her to be frightened about, not when she’s in Damon’s room and he’s blocking the doorway just like it’s not even there. This is the life she was raised for, she thinks. It’s why she needs to be strong. 

“Does Katherine - “

“No,” Says Elena, “She doesn’t. It’s not like I know when Stefan will keep me on late.” 

Somehow, she thinks, it’s not what he’d wanted to ask her. 

“I can give you a ride,” Damon says, “Or - I can call your sister and tell her that you’re staying here?” 

“You would do that?” She asks him. 

“No,” Damon tells her, “But Stefan would. They have history - didn’t you know?”

Elena laughs - and it feels, for once, like it should. 

****

19

When Elena turns nineteen, she’s faced with a chilling dilemma. _You can leave now,_ Alaric tells her. It seems like it’s worse than it was when all she had known was the year that she missed because Katherine messed up her schedule, the days that she used to spend wondering if it would be worth it to gather her home in a box and ride out into halcyon sunsets. But she was a child back then, and these days, she isn’t a child. These days, she’s not even a sister. She wonders how he doesn’t know that, when everyone else seems to know.

There is no one left here, for Elena. None of _her_ kind, anyways. Bonnie met someone in Salem and left to go practice her craft. Caroline - _Jeremy_ \- Elena will not think about. Vicki’s in rehab and Matt went away on a scholarship. Tyler is probably dead. Stefan, she thinks, ran away - though Damon could always be lying. It is only him and Alaric, and the phantoms that she could have had. But Elena can’t make herself leave. 

She got high here, for the first time, with Jeremy, at the very edge of the woods on a clear summer’s night when she should have been doing her homework. It was just after Katherine had died, and the first time that they ever fought. _You have to be careful_ , he’d told her, _Do you know what I’d do if I found out that you’d gotten hurt?_ The worst part was that she had known - he would have been disparate, inconsolable. He’d have turned his humanity off. And she’d kissed a boy here, the first time, not Damon. She remembers the dress she was wearing that night, and the feel of his warm, human lips. 

She lost someone here for the first time. Felt her heart break, here, for the first time. Wished she could die here the first time - and, soon after, the second. Learned what it meant to be scared here. Learned what it meant to be free. Taught herself how to mourn and to shatter. Tasted vervain and showed herself how to breathe. 

And Elena knows, with a knowing that’s more than just knowing, that she cannot ever leave. Where else, she thinks, does the air smell like parchment and death? 

****

16

The Gilbert’s are an old family, Caroline says. An old family new to town. There is loss in their family, Caroline says, and so she watches with interest. Grief drives a great many things. She meets Jeremy on a Sunday, when everyone else might be dead. Only the stoners come into town on the holy day, and she thinks that it makes its own sense. Better drugs than a stake, thinks Elena, wondering if he’s met Katherine. She’ll be late for _their_ day, but she couldn’t care less about that. Because the truth is, she’s seen him, and feels so _glad_ that she thinks a human, for once, is pretty. Katherine would want her to do this. Their mother would want this for her. So Elena slows down on the sidewalk and lets him run into her.

“I’m sorry,” He says, “Do you - Do you want any pills, or anything?” 

“Forward of you,” She tells him. He _does_ look sorry, though. 

“Yeah, well, why not?” He says, “I don’t think that I’ve met you yet.” 

“Elena Pierce,” She tells Jeremy, watching the way his eyes move. They’re drinking her in like he thinks that she’s pretty, too. Jeremy’s _tall_ for a boy, and his sweatshirt looks gray and soft. She wishes that she could feel it. Elena’s aware of the way she must look. Clean, put together, and hiding. Why else would someone be out? “I don’t do pills,” She tells him, “I’m sorry.” 

“That’s okay,” Jeremy says. “What do you do, then, Elena?” 

“I’ll tell you later,” She says. 

(That evening, Damon gets mad.) 

****

20

“I need to know who she is.”

“Before,” He asks her, “Or after?” 

“Why would I want to know after?” 

“The same reason, Elena, that you know I can’t tell you before.” 

_Because I won’t do it_ , he does and does not say. _Because you won’t drink if I do._

( _Is this what’s become of us, Damon?_ she thinks. _Can I even trust you at all?_ )

“No,” Says Elena, “I’m sorry, but I need to know. Who is she, Damon? Who’s Isobel?”

“Didn’t you know? She’s your mother.” 

****

15

Elena cannot change most things, but she can look forwards to some. History class with Alaric, she lets herself look forwards to. He doesn’t ask her hard questions, lets her reside in her hands, and, for that, she is grateful. With Alaric she doesn’t pretend that she hasn’t grown up with Katherine. He wouldn’t ask that of her. He tells her that it would be wrong, which Damon says is a pithy excuse for humanity. When she comes with the Teacher’s Aide form, Alaric hardly blinks.

“What is this for?” He asks her. 

“What do you think it’s for, Alaric?” 

He lets her do that - call him Alaric, and not Mr. Saltzman. _I’m practically family, Elena_ , he’d told her. _For God’s sake, just call me my name_. She can’t understand why he doesn’t take God’s name seriously. Maybe he says it the same reason she says it for. Because they are human, and can. _That’s what this is for,_ thinks Elena. _The manner in which we’re alive. Needing to talk about that_. 

“I have a free slot,” She says, “And I’m tired of dipping with Bonnie.”

“The Bennett girl?” Alaric asks, “Are you close?” 

“She’s a witch,” Says Elena, “Katherine wants me to know her.” 

And hadn’t that been unexpected - how Katherine had pulled her aside in the foyer to tell her that they should stick close. _I may need her powers,_ she’d told her, _You will not fail me in this_. 

_No one can fail you_ , Elena’d thought fleetingly. _No one would so much as dare_. Bonnie once told her that they were best friends, and Elena had choked on her bile. 

“Christ,” Says Alaric, shaking his head like he’s clearing a migraine away, “You do know what TA’ing entails?” 

“How hard could it be?” Asks Elena. 

“Well,” Says Alaric, “It depends on the level of favoritism.” 

“So for me, you’ll make it easy.” 

“No,” Says Alaric, “For you, it’ll be what you need.” 

“You don’t know what I need,” Says Elena. The words taste sour and foreign. 

“Maybe I don’t,” Says Alaric, “But I guarantee you don’t know either. Just give it a try for me, will you?” 

“Okay,” She tells him, “Okay.” 

He signs his name in a bittersweet flourish. The paper’s more salmon than pink. 

“You start on Monday,” Alaric says. “And Elena? Please don’t be late.” 

****

57

She meets Isobel in a parking lot outside of _Macey’s_. Elena is older than her mother is, but she knows that she’d gotten turned younger, and she wonders if that makes her sad. Isobel looks like Elena had thought that she would. Stern. Apathetic. Indifferent. She can hear by the beat of her heart that she’d never wanted a daughter. _Thank you,_ she thinks, to no one and nobody else, _For making this easy on me_.

“Isobel,” She says, “My name is Elena. I’m sure you remember which one.” 

“And for a minute I thought you were Katherine. My, how alike you two are.” 

“Only in looks,” Says Elena. 

“And species,” Isobel says. 

“Yes,” Says Elena, “And that.” 

****

17

“How do you know you’re in love?”

“Where is this coming from, ‘Lena?” 

“Don’t call me ‘Lena,” She tells him, “Can’t you just answer the question?”

“I don’t know. You know you’re in love when it feels like you’ve just gotten staked while you’re hyped up on out-of-date wine.” 

“Doesn’t it only get better with age?” Asks Elena. 

“Yep,” He says, “That’s the whole point. Seriously, what’s going on with you?” 

“What’s going on,” Says Elena, “Is that I think you’re flirting with me.” 

“I don’t _mean_ anything by it.” 

This much, she knows, is true. He doesn’t like her like that. And, if he does, then he keeps it quite well-concealed. That is Damon’s prerogative. He has taken it upon himself to be lonely, at the expense of giving Elena as much as he thinks that he can. Afternoons talking like real people do, instead of those known to the damned. 

“Doesn’t sound like it to me.” 

“Cut the crap, Elena. Who have you fallen in love with? Do you need me to kill them for you?” 

He is searching her face for a signal, a sign, that she’s wandered into new danger. Damon scares her, sometimes, when he’s like this, looking at her like she’s just one more book to read. (Call of the Wild, _Jack London. Let me guess,_ Wuthering Heights?)

“It’s nothing,” She tells him, “It was only a hypothetical. Only a theory,” She clarifies.

“You know,” Damon tells her, “Most things are theories, until they get proven as true. _Hypothetically_ , who have you fallen in love with?” 

“Yeah, like I’d _ever_ tell you.” 

“You’ll tell me,” He says, “Give it time.” 

She opens and closes her mouth. Thinks about after-school ‘studying’ sessions, the way that the graves look in sunlight ( _Gray and Miranda. My parents_ ). The feeling of hands on her own. Watching him draw in carefully thought-over lines, glancing up now and then with a wonderstruck grin on his face to make sure he was getting it right. 

“Jeremy Gilbert,” She tells him. 

Damon practically _growls_. 

But that is only her life.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Note: Thank you for everyone reading and reviewing this story! I'm super glad for the reception this story is getting and that people are enjoying it despite how weird the premise is. As a reward for taking the chance on this story, I present chapter two: The one where Elijah shows up!**

**16**

Jeremy lives with John Gilbert, his uncle, whom she knows to be on the council. Katherine hates him fiercely, with a passion that burns like the sun, though she won’t tell Elena why. Still, John Gilbert is nothing but courteous to her, on the few occasions they talk. He seems like the kind of man who would want to put stakes into vampires, though she is far too afraid to ask him if Jeremy knows. For one thing, it would expose her, and, for another, if he didn’t, surely he’d be told after. She doesn’t want that for him.

Jeremy was an accident. That’s what she tells herself. The first time that she met him wasn’t. But the second time was, and it was that very same day. _Did you follow me?_ She had asked him. He was standing, gawky, outside the boarding house door. _You do know you could’ve just knocked._

_Yeah, well,_ Jeremy’d said. _It sounded like things weren’t going that well. So I wanted to - make sure that you were alright._

She had looked him over a moment and realized that he was shy. Later, she’d learn that he’d always been shy, in the cute way that she found endearing. Even before his parents had drove off the bridge. But in that moment, there had only been her and him and him caring, somehow, for Elena. He had rocked from his toes to his heels and shot her a small, confused smile that made the blood rush to her cheeks. _I’m fine,_ she had told him. _Aren’t you supposed to be high?_

_Sure,_ he had told her, _I get high sometimes. But I don’t meet girls like you very often._

Elena comes to his house when she can, when she thinks that Katherine might let her. And, sometimes, when she thinks that Katherine wouldn’t. Being with Jeremy’s easy. It doesn’t cost her a thing. He likes to talk to her about things such as having parents, and she finds it’s easy to listen. At any rate, it doesn’t hurt her. He asks her all of these questions, and that, she finds, is harder. But it’s hard in a way that she hadn’t thought it would be - because, despite all her misgivings, Elena _wants_ to tell Jeremy things. She _wants_ to hear what he’d say if she told him what vampires are. See if he’d run and tell John.

That’s not what happens, though.

What happens is they’re at the cemetery, for a change, and Jeremy’s doing a sketch. He takes his old sketchbook everywhere with him, as well as a dark charcoal pencil. His lines are very pretty, she thinks, and not just the ones on his body. It’s a clear, cool day just a few months after it all, and Jeremy’s nose is scrunched up in soft concentration.

“Elena?” He asks her, and pauses, “I know that I’ve asked you already, but what are your parents like?”

She has never answered him this. She’s always brushed it off, told him she had to go home. Her sister, Katherine, would worry. But now he is looking at her, and she catches a glimpse of his drawing. He’s drawing a beautiful girl.

“Is that - “

“It’s a question, Elena,” He says. It’s harsh, he must think, though nothing that he says is harsh. “I’m sorry. I just - I wish that I knew you, alright?”

“Yeah,” She tells him, “I wish that I knew myself, too.”

“What do you mean?” He asks her.

Elena shrugs her shoulders. It’s a good shrug, the kind that takes effort and practice. It is meant to convey, _Please, please don’t ask._ And then he is sidling next to her. Drapes an arm over her, and it’s warm.

“I don’t have parents,” She tells him, “I don’t even know what their names are. Katherine doesn’t like talking about them. We moved a lot, when I was young. And I just - had to find myself, every time. I don’t know who I am, now. I don’t think that I’ve ever known.”

( _Where_ were _you?_ Katherine asks her, that night when she gets home. _Out,_ says Elena. She’s never kissed anybody before. Certainly not by a gravestone.)

(It seems quite thoroughly Damon.)

**17**

There’s something that nobody says when somebody that you love dies, and this is the shape that it takes:

“She was a horrible person.”

“I know what you think,” Says Elena, “And I don’t want to hear it, Alaric.”

_Don’t hate him for it,_ Damon will tell her, when she collapses onto the boarding house sofa, thinking of where Stefan’s gone, and where people go when they die. _He thinks that he has freedom, now._

_She wasn’t going to kill him,_ she’ll tell him. This, they’ll both know, is a lie.

The truth is that Alaric’s good. It’s been two years since she met him and already he is her family. Family _should_ talk to family. She knows that that’s what he thinks. It isn’t the way that things are, but Elena cannot begrudge him for it when he’s doing the best that he can.

“If she was a horrible person, then why did you let her take me?” She asks. Alaric looks unimpressed.

“Did I ever tell you what you were like as a kid?”

“No. And I don’t want to know, so don’t start.”

“What do you want to know, Elena?” He asks her.

“I don’t know. We could start with my parents,” She tells him.

“I can’t, Elena. I promised.”

“Of course you promised,” She tells him, “And I bet that it means something to you. More than me knowing my parents?”

“Elena -”

“I know they’re not you,” She says, and then, without thinking, she runs. Elena dislikes running. It’s sad to do when you know how fast you could be if you would just give up your life. And that is another thing - would her sister have turned her? Or was she resigned to it being like this? It should bother Elena that she goes to Damon, not Jeremy - not in the least because it really won’t bother him - but she’s fresh out of tears and her tired legs beg her to go there. She doesn’t knock on the door. Can’t find the strength inside her. But she remembers something that Katherine said to her once - _You_ know _that there isn’t a door in this town that would not yield from my need -_ and, like that, it swings open. She sways at the threshold, vaguely aware of her blood. Who cut her, she thinks, is a mystery.

“Damon,” She says. She sounds shameful, and weak, and pathetic. “Damon, please let me in. I forgive you for - everything, I don’t know, _please,_ could you just let me in?”

Even to her, the forgiveness part sounds deceitful.

He doesn’t say she can come in. Just pulls her, in his strong arms, through the door.

**46**

Finding her isn’t a conscious decision. It is something that she needs to do, but not because she has chosen it. There are too many people she owes it to, least of all her and Katherine. And Damon doesn’t call her on it, not even when she is screaming at him, clawing his face like she’s something cornered and dying. It devolves, as per usual, into _My mother, my mother,_ but this time there’s intent behind it - and, perhaps because he knows that, or perhaps because she has finally worn him down, Damon lets her make a plan. It isn’t a very good plan, but it’s somewhere to start. And that, thinks Elena, makes all the difference in the world.

“When do you propose that we do this?” He asks her, in much the same way that she might ask him, _Why don’t you drink your own blood?_

“I don’t know,” Elena says, “Soon. You do know that I can leave now, if I want.”

“You don’t,” Damon tells her, “So don’t even think about it.”

Damon is right - there is nowhere else she wants to go - but admitting to that would be losing, and she learned a long time ago that it’s better to just stand your ground, if you want to be someone at all.

“If my mother were there, I would go.”

“That’s a lie,” Damon tells her, “Whyever would you do that?”

“Because,” Says Elena, “Because.”

“That isn’t an answer, Elena.”

It isn’t. She isn’t that stupid, is she? But that is the purpose of living - you try and you fail, and then you get up and do it all over again. At least for Damon, failing means just getting staked. ( _But what does it mean for you?_ Thinks Elena, _Getting a bad grade sometimes? What do grades matter, when monsters stalk through the dark?)_

“Because,” She tells him, “You’re going to help me. And if you don’t help me, I’ll ask Alaric to do it.”

It hits a nerve. She is satisfied by it - though she can’t honestly say _how_ long she’s known that the two of them had something, once. ( _You are more like her sister,_ Stefan once told her, _Than you could possibly know.)_

“You want _Alaric_ to help you hunt down his vampire wife?”

“He’d do it for me. She’s my mother.”

“That doesn’t mean that he _should._ ”

“I know,” She tells him, “And that’s why you’re going to.”

“Elena,” He tells her, “I don’t think that you want to know.”

This is what Damon says. What he doesn’t say: She is almost fifty years old. They went by too quickly to count. She’s bitten too many people. It might take them that long to find Isobel, and her anger will grow with her sorrow. Damon can’t stand when she’s sad. And, when they find her, it won’t take her long to remember why she hadn’t wanted this; why Katherine had tried to protect her, and what it had been, exactly, that she was protecting her from. (She will also remember that she, probably, loves him, which really doesn’t help her much at all.)

“Leave Ric out of this,” Damon tells her, “We don’t involve humans in our affairs.”

“Anymore,” She says.

“Anymore.”

It feels so _good,_ she thinks to herself. As good and as sharp and as much full of pleasure as drinking down freshly-killed blood.

**8**

There’s a house on the side of the road where she goes when her sister is out. It’s an old, hunchbacked woman who lives there. She bakes her cookies and tells her to run along home. Elena likes to go inside her house, see the pictures of families that hang on the north-facing wall. She has children, she thinks. Just like her parents had children. The old woman likes to ask things about her, and she answers the best that she can. _I live with my sister and uncle,_ she tells her, _I don’t know about anyone else._

She is eight when the old woman comes to their doorstep instead. Elena won’t let her in - she knows the smell of vervain in somebody’s teeth. But she is a fool for thinking this way, because vampires cannot carry it, and so she just has to stand there, giving herself away.

“You’re a _Petrova,”_ The old woman says, “I thought that your kind was dead.”

“We are,” Says Elena, and slams the door in her face.

Three years later, they move.

**15**

There are dead things in Mystic Falls. Doppelgangers, she thinks, too. That’s what Stefan calls them. And there are bonds that cannot be broken. Things that are stronger than love. Like tolerance to vervain. Elena drinks whiskey on boiling afternoons. She dreams about being a human, instead of this in-between spirit that navigates both of the worlds. She’s more than a bit of a loner - she knows the way people talk. Vicki Donovan called her a freak, once, and she punched her out in the school parking lot. She was almost expelled for having a stake in her backpack. She _knows_ the way people talk.

Bonnie says that it’s just how they want to see things. They can’t understand what the world’s really like. They haven’t been there and done that. But Bonnie doesn’t know anything. The most that she knows of the world is the camp up in Salem where she goes with her Grams for the holidays - which, consequently, she begged to be able to go to one year, the first time that Katherine decided she wouldn’t compel her. It makes the scar stand out more, and when Elena washes she can see the deep, crusted pain of it, and feel how they felt - like twin knives without the giddiness of lust. It aches underneath her shirt-sleeve when she bends over the newest papers.

“This is… A lot.” Says Elena. “Where did you _find_ all of this?”

“My wife’s old office, at Duke.”

“Your wife?” Elena asks.

“Isobel,” Says Alaric.

“I’ve heard about her,” She says. Misses the stunned way he blinks, “How did she _know_ about this?”

“She knew your sister,” He says.

It’s a perfunctory answer, the kind that Damon would give, if Damon was keen on stashing vervain needles inside his glovebox. She wants to resent him for it, but she’s too distracted for that. _Where to start?_ Thinks Elena.

“We need to tell Damon,” She says.

“Elena -”

“What?” She asks him, “Damon was here when it happened. If it’s true - Then he’ll know how we should deal with it all.”

‘It all’, she thinks, is inadequate to describe their current vampire tomb crisis, but for now, she thinks, it’ll do. Just until Damon gets her. _Just until Damon is here._

“He’ll tell us that we should just leave it,” She says, to his questioning glare.

“Will he?” Alaric asks.

“I forgot. You don’t know him that well.”

_And I forgot,_ his looks seem to say, _That you do._

“I didn’t know that Katherine knew her. Your wife.”

“Most people don’t,” Says Alaric. “I didn’t, even. This was - it was years before I met Katherine,” He tells her, “She never talked about her. She was just - one of Isobel’s ‘friends from the South’.”

“Where did she say that she came from?” She asks.

“Atlanta,” Alaric says.

“Huh,” Says Elena, “I’ll have to ask her about that.”

_I wouldn’t,_ Damon will tell her, _Not if you don’t want to die._

_Maybe that is what I want,_ she will tell him.

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.

**59**

Klaus. Agony. Running. Pine needles. _Klaus._

These are the things that pulse through her head in a loop.

Elena no longer knows how long she has been hanging here, the thick rope cutting off her circulation, bruising and blackening her beyond all hope of recognition. But she knows it has been long enough. No one is coming to save her.

Not even, she thinks, Elijah.

_I should make you forget him,_ Klaus said. _You don’t_ get _to know that he’s kind._

Out of all of them, Klaus said, Elijah is still alive. But he has not come to save her. And so Klaus was right when he laid the flaying blows on her - Elena is no one to him. She thinks about him anyways. The culling weight of the heartbreak, the crisp-noted thump of his shoes. Damon’s head, cracked like an eggshell. Katherine’s wounds oozing out pus. Jeremy, crucified, nails pushing out of his ankles. Elena cannot hold her weary eyes open, but closing them is a bane. _Don’t worry, love,_ Klaus has told her. _They won’t hurt as badly as you will._ Elena takes comfort in it, then hates herself for taking comfort.

She looks her way downwards, and finds that her body is thin.

**17**

“This one,” Elena tells Caroline, “This one, it has to be. _Please._ ”

“You think blue’s my color?” She asks.

“Definitely,” Says Elena. She is reveling in the thrill of this - after all, Caroline Forbes is the last person she should be with. Her mother’s the sheriff. She practically runs the council, to overhear John Gilbert say it - which, for some reason, Katherine keeps seeming to do. But Elena figures that maybe it’s fine to be friends with a _girl._ Someone who lives for the gossip, the drama, the fighting. It’s a different kind of fighting than she’s gotten used to, but she feels that she ought to learn it; at least try to be the person she once could have been. And that entails, so far as Caroline is concerned, wasting inordinate amounts of time that should be spent helping Alaric lace all the Decade Dance punch with vervain –

Shopping for dresses.

Frilly, expensive, one-time use dresses that will not fit in a year. _You_ have _to come with me,_ Caroline’d told - begged - her on Thursday. _Bonnie’s away on vacation, and I have to look pretty for Matt, and I just - I need your help, Elena._ Her usual Caroline fastness had gotten to vampire speed, and so, haltingly, Elena’d agreed. No amount of apologizing would make Alaric forgive her( _Because I already have,_ he had said, when she’d raised the point, _You don’t have to ask me. You know that.)_

Dresses, then. The blue one. Caroline wears it the way she wears all of her clothes. Perfectly. Confidently. Effortlessly. She asks things like _Does this accentuate me?_ In what should be a fake-English accent. She cares about what her color is - and, more shocking still, she cares about Elena’s.

“What are you wearing?” She asks, “To the dance?”

“I’m not going,” She says, “I’m not really - with anyone.”

_It’s not like Damon’d go with me. Not if I were alive._

“Ask Jeremy,” Caroline says.

“What?”

“Jeremy Gilbert? I know how much time you two spend. You’re giving off _classic_ crush vibes, Elena. Seriously, you should ask him. I bet he’ll say yes. Which means that _you_ need something to wear!”

“I don’t think -”

“Humor me? I’m really pissed off that Bonnie is skipping like this. I’m her _best friend,_ and she didn’t even give any notice. Half the fun of school dances is going and seeing your friends.”

_I don’t have friends,_ Thinks Elena.

“I have to ask my sister,” Is what she tells Caroline.

“Katherine _has_ to let you come,” Caroline says. “Tell you what - if she says no, give me a call and let me convince her.”

“I don’t think that that’s a good idea, Care. No offense.”

But Caroline isn’t listening anymore. She is lost in her normal life. Hunting through dress racks instead of the deadness of night. When Caroline Forbes emerges triumphant, it is not with blood on her hands that might - or might not - be her own.

“Try on this one,” She tells her. “Your color is _totally_ green.”

**143**

There’s not enough time in the world left. And there’s too much time in the world. Elena read once that the planet’s end comes when the sun swallows it like a vampire suckles a bite, pouring its fire onto the war-ravaged continents. But she gets the feeling that sound will end long before then. In the absence of humans, her strength will soon become weakness. From all that she sees of it, nothing is left anyways. There are roads, and they travel those. There are cities they visit and hotel rooms, where they sleep. It was a test of faith when they switched from two beds to one. A sign of the times when they’d switched back from one bed to two. A panic attack when she’d realized she couldn’t have children which near made him leave her forever. And that threat, which means something, now that forever is theirs.

When Elena was fifty, it seemed like her life had some purpose. When she was sixty, she thought she had wasted her time. Now she’s a hundred and seventy-five. She has loved and lost a man who can’t love, and who, also, wasn’t a man. The world’s reinvented itself too many times for Elena to know how to count. There’s a tree in a forest that hasn’t been born yet where someday she’ll go carve her name. There are people she hugs in the darkness who curl their fingers over her thinness but cannot make her feel warm. _We are cold-blooded creatures,_ Katherine’d told her once.

She barely remembers her name.

**17**

“I’m seeing a girl.”

How can four words ruin somebody’s life? If they’re in a dream, they can do it by being the thing that you don’t want to hear. But in real life, that comes with hearing.

“Who is she?” She asks.

“She’s not from around here,” He tells her, “I mean. She’s homeschooled. Her name is Anna. You’d get along with her, I think.”

_(Elena is, of course, dreaming.)_

_(It doesn’t matter that much.)_

_(It isn’t like she’d be hurt.)_

**11**

Katherine calls this ‘adjustment’. _We’re in adjustment, Elena._ That is what she’s always said. But this time, she doesn’t say it, just shows her where everything is. _There are the places that you stay away from,_ she says. Elena nods and writes down the names in her journal, but only when Katherine is gone. Letting her see it’s not safe.

Mystic Falls, Katherine’d said, is their home. She’d said it the way that somebody says they’re in love. So fierce and so final Elena can’t help but believe it. She does not _want_ Mystic Falls - she misses her home, and Alaric - but this is something she has, and she can accept that, someday. She misses not having to kill anyone for the chance of a roof and a bedroom. Gardening isn’t her strength, but she wants to learn the new soil, feel the darkness of it on her skin. It’s a darkness Elena can _know -_ not like the one Katherine holds, that keeps her alive in the daytime. There are things to get done, she knows. New clothes to shop for. A school schedule to pick up. Introductions that she’ll have to make. But tonight she is somewhere that she hasn’t been, and she needs comprehension of that. She needs to _know_ what will happen. And Katherine, she knows, will not tell.

“You snuck out,” Katherine says, when she finds her out here, looking askance at the flowers. “I’m impressed by you, ‘Lena. Are you starting to doubt me, again?”

“I’ve never doubted you, Katherine,” She says. Later, she’ll think that her voice sounded weak, but she’ll remember, then, that she was young.

**16**

“You’re bothered,” She says.

It isn’t a question, but statement. The kind that you don’t make with _them._ Still, she can see it in him, in the restless way that he’s pacing and the dagger-y set of his eyes. They are less blue in this moment than black, like the bruises peppering her. Elena wishes that she could say it’ll be fine. But really, she knows, none of this will be fine. It hasn’t been _fine_ since she was eleven years old, and Katherine decided that moving them here would be fun. _So much for keeping me safe,_ thinks Elena. She’ll wonder, later, if he knew who she was from the start. If he watched when they pulled in the lot for that first, for that list, glimpse of Katherine. If, at seeing the small girl who’d clung to her shoulder, he’d wanted a stake in his heart.

“Elena,” He tells her, “Elena.” A hand running through, pulling his hair. She doesn’t _feel_ bruised. She wishes that she could tell him, but telling him would be admitting, and Elena can’t afford that. _Fuck it,_ she thinks - she knows Katherine would hate it, but fuck it. _I want to be close to somebody. What’s_ wrong _with me?_ Thinks Elena.

“I need to call someone,” She tells him.

“No way in hell,” Damon says.

“Not Katherine,” She tells him, “Alaric. I just - I need to tell him -”

“To stake my brother?” Asks Damon, “I’ll be doing that part myself.”

His words are a dark threat of promise. They furl in her like a rose too uncertain to bloom.

“You don’t have to do that,” She says.

“I told you’d I fix it,” He tells her.

“Yeah, but you’re already here.” It isn’t a lie, she realizes. It’s a truth that she’s been sitting on. “I’m safe with you, Damon. What else could I ever need?”

Does it sound harsh to him, wonders Elena? He’s looking at her like it did. And maybe she said it a little bit cruel, a little bit shocked and too frightened, because what does saying it _mean?_ That she feels something for him? He’s turned his humanity off. But she knows that she still had to say it. Because it was honest. Because it was true, and nobody’s taken that yet.

“Do you want to stay here?” He asks her. “Stefan might be back soon.”

“No,” Says Elena, “But you’re more than welcome at mine.”

“Ha,” Damon tells her, “I thought you weren’t _stupid,_ Elena.”

One look in his eyes and she knows that he wants to compel her. It sends a sweet thrill down her side that has nothing to do with the danger.

“We can’t all be smart,” Thinks Elena, “We live in _Mystic Falls._ Nobody’s smart here, but everyone else seems alive.”

_Yes,_ she thinks, _Everyone else. Not you, because you are dead. Not me, because someday I will be. But everyone else, they’ve done well._ He’s standing too stiffly for Damon. His vampiric control has always been effortless, lazy, but now he looks almost as if he wishes that he could be holding her tightly, pulling her close to his chest. And she’s glad that she’s wearing vervain, because, if he asked her, she’d let him. _It isn’t enough,_ thinks Elena, _Please, let it just be enough._

“Your house,” He says, “Is still Katherine’s.”

“No,” Says Elena, “It’s not.” She doesn’t know how she knows, but she hears the voice her in head. _Thank you for keeping her safe._ “The blood that was spilled was for me. Besides,” She says - and she knows, now, she’s being too brave - “My bedroom’s still mine, isn’t it?”

“You want me to _sleep with you?”_ Damon asks.

“I want you to stay,” Says Elena, “It doesn’t have to be in the bed.”

Damon appraises her frankly.

“Elena Pierce,” He says, and she wonders how many times it’ll take him to finally stop calling her that. “I am going to give you a choice. You can leave this house, right now, and never come back in my sight; or, I will come with you and make sure you get through the night. I’ll give you three minutes, Elena.”

“And then?”

“You’re going to leave.”

_But I’m not,_ thinks Elena, _I’m not._

And really, it is too easy. She takes her necklace off.

“Do you know what this is?” She asks Damon. “This is vervain. Alaric gave it to me. He told me to use it whenever I needed protection. And that’s what I’m doing now.”

She throws the necklace to the side of his bed she’s not on. This is where he’s sat her, and she keeps looking up at the clock. _I don’t need to be home,_ thinks Elena, _I need to be where you are._ How had she not _known_ before?

“I trust you,” She tells him, “And if you don’t want me to, make me forget.”

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.

**20**

He gives her a blood bag, to start.

“You thought I would let you kill someone?” He says, when the redness is gone from her eyes and the spiderweb veins have retreated. “ _Christ,_ Elena, you - “

“I’m dead,” She says, “Give me a break.”

It ought to be funny, the way she’d once thought that it would. Her turning had never been optional. She had always known it was coming. It was only the when and the how. She had dreamed about it like a wedding. But this is what’s going to happen: She will go outside and kill the man that she wishes she could call father. He will tell her that it’s alright, and she won’t hear anything save for the beat of his heart and the flow of his blood in his veins. She will want to rip into that part of his neck that lays bare. And Damon, she knows, wouldn’t stop her. Stopping her isn’t his way.

The blood had an Alice-in-Wonderland taste. Pineapple, buttered toast, ham. It tasted like cool summer mornings, strawberries dipped in whipped cream. It tasted, she’d thought, quite like Damon. Whiskey and leather and eating more than she could say.

“What am I going to do?” Asks Elena.

“You’re going to learn how to live,” Damon says. And then - and then - they _do_ laugh, because even in dying, they still have to learn how to live. Why do they have to learn that? She’s always hated it, anyways, the way people talked about them. _Drink blood,_ they would say, _Stay alive._ You can’t stay something you aren’t, she had thought. Rolled it around like a pearl inside of her hand. You can’t love what you’ve already loved. It never feels the same twice.

“Who’s going to teach me?” She asks.

“You’ll teach yourself,” Damon tells her. And there are two ways that she can take it. The first way, the way that he wants it to mean, or the way that it probably does. There’s no compulsion in her, anymore. It’s draining away like a river off into the sea. _You told me you loved me,_ she thinks. _How could you make me forget? How could I have not said it back?_ There’s a scar on her neck from the necklace that she’d still been wearing. She lets herself blame Alaric for that; for trying to save her, any way he knew how. _You can’t save me,_ she thinks. _You couldn’t have done, and you can’t._ She wishes she had some more blood.

“Then where do I start?” Says Elena.

“By telling somebody,” He tells her. As if, thinks Elena, they don’t all already know.

“You think that’ll help me?” She asks him. “You honestly think that’ll help?”

“Think of it this way,” Says Damon, and she hears, without seeing, his swallow. “You’re twenty years old, and you’re hiding a secret. You’re something that nobody wants you to be, and Elena, it’s starting to kill you. Because you don’t have a choice, anymore. That choice - because of your home, and your family, and the person you are - it’s just gone. The only thing you want to do is tell somebody who loves you. But you don’t have that, Elena. The person who loved you is dead.”

_You fought,_ she remembers saying, when Stefan told her the story. _I didn’t want to,_ he’d said.

“Do you understand now, Elena?” He asks her, “You _have_ somebody, okay?”

And she looks at him, and he looks at her, and there’s nothing for either of them. Mystic Falls isn’t his home. It’s a place that he comes to whenever he needs to feel lonely and wretched and scared. He came here to think about Katherine. Never daring that she might come back and stay. _You’re a child,_ he’d told her. He’d seen them, that morning, her arms. She’s seen them, too, in the mirror, more times than she can count. Whatever Damon said pales at remembering that: _Tell them whatever you like,_ Katherine’d said, _But you won’t say a thing - you won’t know a_ thing - _about me._

_I know,_ thinks Elena, _I know._

She has had someone from the very first moment they met. When she stood on the doorway and took up the knocker and felt its keen weight as it fell. It wasn’t Stefan who’d answered the door. It was someone who’d put her at ease, by making sure she went back to that place that Katherine taught her was safe. The one where every sense you have is constantly on alert.

“I’m a vampire, Damon,” She tells him. Hears, without seeing, his fangs. “Now what are we going to do?”

**57**

It feels too bizarre to be sitting somewhere with her mother. But Isobel wanted to this, and maybe Elena did too. She doesn’t tell Damon about it. It’s none of his business, she thinks. All the more so because she knows it’s going to hurt her.

“How old are you, darling?” Isobel asks. They sit on brown barstools and try not to look at each other.

“Younger than you,” Says Elena.

“Vervain?” Isobel asks her.

“Katherine’s style, not mine.”

“Hmm,” Isobel tells her, “That surprises me, I won’t lie.”

“Why?” Asks Elena. It’s the humanity still left inside her that craves any answer, no matter how tiny, that her mother sees fit to give.

“It was the only thing she ever did that I wanted to replicate.”

“Drinking vervain?” Asks Elena.

“I wanted vampirism. Katherine wanted _immortality._ ”

“Katherine -”

“I heard all about it,” Isobel says, “Which one of them did it, Elena? I want to give him a medal.”

“The bad one,” She says. It’s the only answer that she can give which will truly tell Isobel nothing. “I burned her,” Elena says, “Afterwards. I threw the ash underneath Wyverly Bridge.”

“Thank God for small favors,” She says.

“And -” Elena swallows, moistening her lips, “Your husband, Alaric. He was good to us, Isobel. I thought that you might like to know.”

“Who are you running from, darling?” Isobel’s eyes have gone darker than Damon’s in lust, and the veins underneath her eyes jump. Elena looks down at her lap. Wonders what she should do. They are not a normal mother and daughter. They’re the farthest they can be from that. Elena is fifty-seven, Isobel over a hundred. They have never spoken before.

“I can’t tell you that,” Says Elena. “But I can tell you about someone else. I promise you it’ll be worth it.”

She gets glimpses, then, to the feeling of him. She’d been so naive, she thinks now, to have ever believed what he said. Only naivete could have led him to do what he had, when everything in her hand told her that he hadn’t earned it. _You never tried to find us,_ she’d told him. _You were a_ father _to me._ He was human, one of her own. And she had never been able to figure out what made him tick. Not like she could with _them._ But he was a father to her. That part isn’t a lie.

“Do you wish that he was your father?” Asks Isobel.

“No,” Says Elena, showing a flash of her fangs, “I’d not have been able to kill him.”

“You’re _mine,_ ” Breathes out Isobel. Not in the way Damon does it, hovering over her neck, pressing into her body and making the sheets feel like water. It isn’t the loving that makes the touch intimate, but that he is the one she has chosen. The one that she wants. The one that she wants to remember, and never, not ever, forget. Sometimes Damon hovers there for a lifetime. After all, they have plenty to spare.

“I’m no one’s,” She tells her, “And I want to keep it that way.”

**15**

“Damon,” She tells him. Fifteen and needing to _speak._

_“_ It isn’t a workday,” He says.

“Are you going to let me come in?” Asks Elena - regardless of everything, even the sun, which hangs high in the clouds like a warning sign not to be loved.

“Do I have to?” He asks her, “Or are you going to leave me alone?”

“If I’m not home by dinner, my sister will have to come get me.”

He lets her in. Sipping on something gold.

“It’s _dusty,_ ” She tells him, “Do you ever _clean_ this place, Damon?”

‘That’s what you’re for, pumpkin,” He says.

Elena gives him a _look._

“Trying it out,” He explains, “For the sake of perserving my sanity.”

“By getting rid of mine?” Asks Elena. “That’s not that bad an idea.”

“Excuse me?” He asks her.

“It’s just - Katherine and I didn’t get to that part. The part where you keep yourself sane. It’s not really part of out lessons.”

“What is?” Damon asks her. His gaze is trained on her intensely, and Elena glimpses her feet.

“The usual things,” She says.

“Which are?”

“How to spot vampires. How to tell if they’re friendly or not. How not to get yourself killed.”

“And?” Damon asks her.

“You can’t unless they want you to. They’re not. Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Have you gotten to compulsion yet?” Damon asks.

“Katherine needs me intact.”

That was the word that Katherine had used, and it is exactly what makes him go livid.

“ _Excuse me?”_

“She needs me intact. She can’t have anyone going - running amok in my mind.”

“Then she’s a sorry excuse for a teacher,” Says Damon, “And you’d do well to find someone new.”

“Actually,” Says Elena - _So now I know why you’re here,_ she can hear Damon thinking, _Go on._ “I have one. Alaric Saltzman, he’s - “

“I know who he is,” Damon snaps. Elena goes wide-eyed.

“You _do?_ ”

“I do my research on who comes into this town.”

“Who is he, then?” Asks Elena. A challenge, a dare, and a threat.

“He teaches history. He has a missing wife. Anything else I should know about him?”

“We lived with him when I was eight.”

Damon’s holding his bourbon glass so tightly she thinks it might shatter.

“He’s the closest thing to a father that I ever had. I talked to him after school. He’s not an idiot, Damon; his door is laced through with vervain.”

“What if he leaves it open?” Asks Damon, “What will your _teacher_ do then?”

“Stake the bitch,” Says Elena, the word yet unsure on her tongue, “He has one that fits on a crossbow.”

“Because _that’s_ what you need,” Damon says, “A dainty creature like you.”

She does not take offense at the ‘dainty’.

“You’re the creature here, Damon,” She says. “I’m not asking for your permission. I’m asking for you to - help me, if it goes south.”

“You can’t _get_ any more south than this,” Damon says - yells, more like, thinks Elena. “You told him about us, Elena?”

“He drove me here,” She admits. “He told me that you killed his wife.”

“I think,” Damon tells her, “That you need to ask him to leave.”

“I think,” Says a voice from behind her, so deep that it’s almost not his, “That you should come tell me yourself.”

“Well,” Damon says, “Isn’t this interesting? Look, Elena. The teacher’s decided to be impolite and _invite himself into my house._ You don’t see Elena doing something like that, Mr. Saltzman, do you?”

“Damon -”

“I hope you enjoy being fucked. I’m assuming you haven’t been, not since Isobel died. But I could arrange it, Alaric. There’s this _lovely_ blond girl I’ve been seeing around -”

“ _Damon -”_

“Who I’m sure isn’t wearing vervain. Unless you’d like to give her a bracelet first?”

They stare at each other and she knows that they want themselves dead. Not for their sins, or their lies, or the people they’d once thought they loved. Just because there’s someone here that they both know would kill them. But there is someone else here who would save them both without blinking, and Elena thinks that they need to know that, too.

“Damon,” She tells him, “Alaric. What year was Mystic Falls founded?”

They say the year in unison, and the harmony strengthens her bones.

“See,” She says, “You can agree on some things.”

“ _Elena,_ ” He says, “That’s a historical fact, not an argument. What are you doing here, anyways? Was this an elaborate ruse?”

The way that he says it tells her he doesn’t believe it, but Alaric doesn’t know that.

“No,” She says, “It was an accidental one, but I think that it worked just as well?”

“You’re an idiot,” Damon says. “Give me one good reason not to twist this man’s head off and leave him dead on the floor.”

“I’ll give you one,” Says Alaric. He’s cleared his throat like a nervous teenager would. “I have a Gilbert ring. Even if you kill me, I won’t die - Not like that,” He clarifies, “Jesus, not like that. I’m not _Isobel,_ for Christ’s sake.”

“Your wife,” Says Elena, “The one Damon killed.”

“Yes,” He says, “She was _beautiful._ Her blood was like ripe, golden _honey_ -”

“You’re disgusting,” She says, “Did you know that?”

“I knew it,” He tells her. Alaric opens his mouth and he spins. “A reminder: No one asked you.”

“Did she -”

“She asked me,” Says Damon, “I wouldn’t have done it without that.”

Alaric looks at Elena. He sees something in him. She knows it.

“Thank you,” He finally tells him, “For making her happy. At least she got something out of it, right?”

“She got cursed,” Damon says, “And lost the love of her life. I wouldn’t call that a win.”

Alaric grins. Damon scowls. And Elena collapses against him, feeling him there like a wall.

_This’ll work,_ she thinks, _This’ll work._

_(What will I do?_ She will ask him someday, _When Alaric dies, what will I do?)_

_(You’ll cry,_ Damon tells her, _You’ll cry and you’ll wish you were dead.)_

**17**

She doesn’t need vampiric hearing to know that they’re fighting downstairs.

_Congratulations,_ she hears Damon saying, _You’ve done what you wanted. You broke her - No, don’t tell me that that was Katherine. That, my dear brother, was_ you.

The boarding house bedrooms are opulence, but Damon’s bedroom is sin. She is wrapped up in it like she’s wrapped up in him, like she feels that she wants him right there. _Why couldn’t you stay?_ Thinks Elena. _Just this once, when I feel so alone?_

_Elena,_ he’ll tell her, _We have to take care of the body._

_Why?_ She will ask him, _Why can’t we just let it be?_

_Because,_ he will say, _She’s your sister. Whatever a monster she might’ve turned into, she let herself be that for you._ And because she’ll be able to tell that he’s talking through razers to say it, they’ll do what they do in the dream. They will go to the edge of the forest, the place where ‘those animals’ roam, and then they will find the old well. Bonnie brews them gallons of stinking vervain water, boiling it cup by cup at her grandmother’s house while the woman lies dead on her couch. _To keep her down when she rises,_ she says. _She’s been staked,_ says Elena, and Bonnie shakes her head sadly. _That’s the problem with it, Elena,_ she tells her, _Once you’re in it, you can’t ever get out._

So the body is there in the well, and Elena is with it down there. _Push her in,_ Stefan’d said, _We don’t need the Petrovas in town._ And when Katherine wakes, like she’d known that she would, to sink her fangs so deep and so sharp in her neck that she knows she won’t breathe again, it is Damon, above her, who laughs. Damon, above her, who’s shaking her out of her sleep. The bed smells of copper and sick. _Great,_ she thinks, _I threw up._

“Elena,” He tells her, “You were having a nightmare.”

“I figured as much,” Says Elena, “You know. From the puke, and the blood.”

It is crusted under her fingernails, and - _Shit,_ thinks Elena, _It hurts._

“What happened?” He asks her.

“You let Katherine kill me,” She says.

“Oh.”

_“Oh?”_

“I wouldn’t,” He tells her, “Not if -”

“Not if what?” Asks Elena, “Not if you thought it was me? Did she ever do that, Damon? Did she come here, impersonating her sister? Did she - “

“Whatever she did,” Damon tells her, “Is dead now, Elena, and gone. Katherine can’t hurt you here.”

It’s the most foolish lie that Elena thinks she’s ever heard. _Once you’re in it, you can’t ever get out._ Elena isn’t religious, but she hopes that Katherine’s in hell. And Elena takes Damon’s hand up. It’s already starting to fade.

“Damon,” She tells him, a raw cry piercing her chest, “I - I _need_ you - I -”

She’s brought it up. _It’s fine,_ thinks Elena, _He feels it._

“How many times?” Damon asks.

“ _So many,_ ” She tells him. She’s feeling it, now, every time. Every pushing of her to the floor. Every ripping off of the clothing. Every seeing a bit of her skin through the silver tone lens of the stove-front as quicksilver fangs were injected. Every cleaning her blood off the floor so hazed she’d seen stars in the tiles. Every screaming the names of a woman and man that she’d never been able to know.

“ _Help me,_ ” She tells him. She knows how scared she must sound. How bad the scars must look. She knows from the look on his face. ( _He’ll kill someone for you, Elena. Surely you’ve realized by now.)_ She feels all these things she does not want to feel. Stefan’s hands and Katherine’s fangs and the sting of herbed silver on her. The way that a neck can just _snap._

_“_ Elena,” He tells her, “I can’t.”

And Elena remembers another compulsion. Stefan, a few hours earlier, digging Katherine’s grave. _We could leave her out in the sun,_ seh had said, but Stefan had locked eyes with her. _Elena,_ he’d told her, _Everything that she gave you will heal. But don’t really think you deserve it._ And she had known - she had known - that it was because she had not wanted to love him. _You can’t help who you love,_ said Jeremy, once. She wishes, though, that she could. Because, through it all, she still thinks she might _love_ her sister. Her cruel, vicious sister who kept her around to drain dry. She wonders if Katherine compelled her to look at Damon and not see what she’s seeing now. The way he is looking at her, and the way, she thinks, that he looks. His dark hair is ruffled and prettier long in a manner she should not have noticed. His blue eyes are clouded with pain and regret, bags hanging low underneath them. His skin is pallid - devoid, thinks Elena, of the blood that he so likes to drink. _Help me,_ she’d told him. _I need you to help me._

_Both,_ she had told him, _Do both._

“We kissed,” Says Elena, “I thought you would make me forget.”

“I’m not Katherine,” He says.

“I’m not either,” She tells him, and Damon’s brows furrow and frown.

“Of course you’re not Katherine, Elena.” He tells her. There’s no part of her, not one single part, that feels as if it cannot trust him.

“You won’t hurt me?” She asks him.

“Why?” Damon asks, “Do you want me to hurt you, Elena?”

He hasn’t said it judging-ly. He’s said it like it’s an option, and she remembers Katherine once telling her that, to her kind, the pain is the same as the pleasure. _You’ll like it,_ she’d told her, suspended over her collarbone. _Sweet sister, you won’t feel at thing._

“I don’t know,” Says Elena, “I’d let you, I think, if you wanted.”

Damon winces. Flinches his head to the side.

“Did I -”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Damon says, “But I need you to stop now, Elena.”

“Will you kiss me again?” She asks Damon.

“Ask me tomorrow,” He says.

**43**

It takes her forty-three years to learn Katherine bided her time. The blood is a hunger in her. Her life is a hunger in her. Damon’s a hunger in her. He has no originality, sometimes, she thinks. He likes catch, bite, erase. But whatever Damon is lacking, Elena can find in herself, and the bloodlust is one of those things. There’s a switch in her brain she turns whenever it’s hard not to hear her heart beat in her chest. She reaches for it like the lights when you’re getting undressed for a lover. Lets the cool dark of it bathe her. _This,_ thinks Elena, _This is how I want to live._ It makes Damon desperate, unhinged, but she couldn’t care less about that. When she flips that switch she is faster than he is, can run for hours knowing that he will not catch her. She’s stronger than he is. She was born for this life, tempered in Katherine’s steel. And she has been cut from the ties that would bind. Bonnie won’t talk to her, anymore. Not since she flashed out her fangs. And Alaric - Alaric had told her he’d put the stake in her himself. Civility, he’d said, was one thing. But vampirism was another. It is the knowing of sounds in the woods, like the one that’s behind her right now. She hears it, the crunch of his shoes.

She can already tell they’re impeccable.

“You’re out in the sunlight,” He tells her, so close that his breath is on her. Eastern European, she thinks.

“You’re ancient,” She tells him, “I’m dead.”

“Mm,” Says Elijah, “But newly. You thought that I could not tell?”

Elena blinks at him. Once. Twice. He has gotten her facing him quickly. And she was right - his shoes, she thinks, are impeccable. Any other human wouldn’t even have heard him approach.

“Elena,” He tells her, “The doppelganger. I presume you don’t have any children.”

“No,” Says Elena, “I don’t.”

“You wanted to end it,” He tells her, “A noble thing to have done, for the cost.”

_What cost?_ Thinks Elena, _What ending?_ Katherine never told her of this. She feels for his energy - hard, she thinks, not to, when it’s pouring off him in waves. There is peppermint, cardamom, cinnamon, iron. He’s the oldest thing she’s ever felt.

“You are sired,” He tells her, “Weren’t you instructed to run?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Says Elena. And, when she falls - like perhaps they’d both known that she would - he lifts her up by her chin.

“Who turned you?” He asks her. His eyes burn compulsion straight into her, and Elena firms under his gaze. Elijah’s compulsion isn’t like Damon’s. It’s softer, somehow, more compassionate. As if he knows that this isn’t what she would have chosen.

“You don’t know me,” She tells him, “And I don’t know a thing about you. Please just leave me alone.”

_He’s a vampire,_ thinks Elena. _An old one who most likely wants you to die._ His hand goes up to her cheekbone, traces it down to her jaw.

“It was nice to meet you, Elena,” He finally says. There’s a tone of remorse in his voice. “You are lucky to look like the others. Next time, you will not be lucky. I will find you, and I’ll put a stake through your heart. You were the key, _doppelganger._ ”

He smiles at her. A bright, true smile like sun on the rush of a creek.

“Until next time, Elena.” He tells her.

He closes his eyes, and she _runs._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As per tradition, four songs that I couldn't stop playing while I was writing/editing this chapter! 
> 
> _PIENSO EN TU MIRÁ_ by ROSALÍA
> 
> _Garden Song_ by Phoebe Bridgers
> 
> _The Governess_ by Metric
> 
> And, finally, 
> 
> _The Sea(Night Version)_ by MØ


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Note: The next chapter is here! I sincerely apologize for the wait on this one - I wanted to get the story finished up before I posted this chapter, and took some time editing this as there were a few mistakes that required correction before I felt comfortable putting it up. I hope that you can forgive me for that. If it helps, there is lots, and I do mean _lots_ of Elijah in this chapter. Which, let's be honest, is the reason we're here!**

**17**

Time heals all wounds, she heard once, but even time can’t heal this. She is standing here, at the edge of a great, roaring fire, the kind that could burn her to death. But anyone, really, but her most of all, and what’s left of her grease-paper heart. She shouldn’t have cared about someone like this - Didn’t Katherine warn her of that? _But I thought that you loved me,_ she thinks. _You drew me. You told me I_ mattered.

“Not that much,” She hears, from somewhere close to the woods. A decision, then, since her reverie’s been interrupted. Leave, or stay. It’s the woods, she thinks. It’s not like she needs invitation. And besides, there is nothing that their kind can do which Elena isn’t prepared for. Her neck is resplendent in pale and vervain. She has a stake in her front jacket pocket. _Fuck it,_ she thinks, and decides.

“I know about you,” Says Elena, moving forward through the hot light. “So don’t try and kill me, alright?”

Her voice sounds weak, to her ears, but somehow, too, it is confident. _Confidence,_ thinks Elena, _Make them all cower in fear ._ It is Katherine’s style, and she’s earned the right to employ it, but Elena decides that it couldn’t hurt that much to wear it out for a night.

“My name,” He says, “Is Elijah. And you’re going to make a mistake.”

“So?” Says Elena, “Doesn’t everyone say that? I mean - Strangers, they always say run away. And as for vampires,” Elena tells him, “I learned how to kill your kind young.”

“You still are young,” He tells her, but a keen glimmer’s come to his eyes. He’s pretty, she thinks, in a way that Jeremy wasn’t and Damon might never be. He stands there like he belongs, and, for a moment, she’s caught in the lie, until she remembers that nobody human lurks in the woods late at night.

“You were waiting for someone like me,” Says Elena, “For someone to drain, when the party was over.”

“Something like that,” Says Elijah.

“Was I close?” Asks Elena. _You’re being an idiot,_ she can hear Damon starting to tell her, but something in her doesn’t care. The man that she thought she had loved broke up with her for a freshman. She has a right to be reckless tonight. And it’s like she once told him - she gets along better with vampires. She knows what vampires want. Even if it scares her, she knows.

**“** Why are you being foolish?” He asks her. She’s sat down by him, and she smells something dark in the air, past the flickering blaze. _He’s feral,_ Elena thinks, _This one._ Strangely, she’s reassured.

“Because,” She tells him, “I don’t have a heart anymore.”

“You don’t have a heart anymore?” Asks Elijah, “And how would that be -”

“Elena.”

“You told me your name,” Says Elijah.

“I’m wearing vervain,” She shoots back.

“Is that so?” Asks the vampire, sliding a little bit closer.

“My history teacher suggested it.”

“And do you tend to listen to your history teacher, Elena?”

“He’s kind of my father,” She tells him, “So yes. I do tend to listen to him.”

_Elijah,_ she’s thinking, _Elijah._ He’s _hot,_ but that could just be the fire. He isn’t holding her down, but she couldn’t move if she tried.

“Who broke your heart, sweet Elena?” He asks her. Preemptive, she thinks, but Elena can’t really care.

“Jeremy Gilbert,” She says. “It’s my own fault, I knew what he was.”

“And what would that be?” He asks her.

“A stoner,” She tells him, “A junkie. A - Is this really important? He was who he was, and I wanted to be with him, right? He had this _one_ smile, Elijah - Can I call you Elijah?”

“Call me whatever you’d like.”

“He used to draw me,” She tells him. Confesses it, to be honest. Something about him makes her feel like she can’t get hurt, like he would kill anybody who tried. But then, she thinks, maybe he just likes to kill. The feeling of blood in his teeth, running over his throat, staining the grass and the fine Italian leather his loafers are made of. Dyeing her somber hair auburn. She wonders if she, also, likes that. She’s lived with them long enough, she’d have thought that _somebody_ drank. _Vampires,_ Damon once told her, _We only live for the chase. We don’t_ stay, _Elena. Don’t you_ dare _ask me to stay._

_“_ He hurt you,” Elijah says then. She’d almost forgotten herself. “Jeremy Gilbert.”

“I don’t think he meant to,” She tells him, “He just - doesn’t love me like that.” _Nobody loves me like that,_ thinks Elena. “And I wish that I could have friends.”

“Friends,” Says Elijah. Rolls it through his cheeks, whistles it back out towards her. “They cause such trouble, Elena. In my experience, friends are the worst thing to have.”

“Yeah,” She says, “Because you want to kill them and drain all the blood from their bodies. It isn’t like that for me.”

“You assume too much,” Says Elijah, “You assume that I make friends with humans.”

“Don’t you?” She asks him. Elijah opens his mouth. She catches a glimpse of what she would see if he smiled. “Aren’t you doing that now?”

“Now,” He tells her, “I’m trying very hard not to bite you.”

“Sucks to be you, then,” She tells him, “I think that we should be friends.”

“Are you negotiating with me?” He asks her. She shakes her head, and there’s an abandon to it.

“You know,” She tells him, “I live with my sister, Katherine. We moved all over the country when I was a kid. She said - she told me that we would be _safe_ here. And I remmber thinking: It didn’t _matter_ any, where it was that we were going. As long as she was a vampire, we would never be safe. And you know what?” She says, “I was right.”

“Katerina,” He says, and she locks their eyes. “I wouldn’t,” He tells her. “It’s like you want me to compel you. Humans - you look for anything trustworthy, even when it’s undeserving.”

“I don’t think you’re undeserving,” She says. Doesn’t know why she says it, but can’t imagine holding it in. She wants him to take it - she wants him to _know._ “I think you’re lonely,” She tells him, “Nobody else here is lonely, but you are, and I am, and - I don’t know. I don’t have a heart anymore, but that doesn’t mean that I should go through life alone.”

“No?” Says Elijah, “I’ve found that it isn’t that bad.”

“You’ve had time,” She tells him.

“And you are heartbroken now,” He says, fitting his hand on her knee, to rest there over her pants, “Trust me, I understand. But you will not be lonely forever. And you know better than most people do what happens to those we call friends.”

“Do you think you could try it?” She asks.

“Why do you want it so much?”

“I guess,” She tells him, “I guess I might just have a death wish.”

He smiles at her, then. Widens the glimpse. _Holy shit,_ thinks Elena, _I don’t even know your last name._

“And I don’t know yours, sweet Elena,” He tells her, “But maybe I should, if we’re friends.”

“Pierce,” She tells him, “It’s Pierce.”

“Mikaelson,” Says Elijah. “I’ll see you around then, Elena?”

“You will,” She tells him, “You will.”

“I know,” He says, and the smile softens out, fades. “You can’t stay away from us, can you?”

“It’s the death wish,” She tells him, “It must be.”

She thinks that she imagines the whisper that comes from the woods when she turns back around. _Stay alive,_ say the trees. _Stay alive._

**327**

_Alaric. Katherine. Caroline. Bonnie. Jeremy Gilbert. Elijah._

These are the people Elena will let herself miss. Not Isobel. Not ever Damon. But everyone else, she thinks - with the stake in her heart and the sound of serenity washing itself through her ears - if there is a heaven, somewhere up there, she’ll try and be grateful for them.

**15**

“I don’t understand it,” He tells her. “I told you that he killed my wife, and you wanted us to be -”

“I wanted you to get along,” Says Elena. She’s looking at her hands. Her fingernails are red again, rubbed raw from fidget-y worry.

“Were you going to give us a choice?”

“I’d’ve cried,” Says Elena, “Does that count?”

“You know,” Says Alaric, “I bet you put Katherine through hell.”

“I think that I still am,” She says.

“Does she know about me?” Asks Alaric, “Your sister?”

“You say it like Damon,” She says.

“How does Damon say it?” He asks her.

“Like Katherine’s not really my sister.”

“I -”

“I don’t want to _hear_ it, Alaric.” She tells him. She’s tired, she thinks, today. She doesn’t need him around. Doesn’t want him here, even, except he won’t let her _near_ Damon. _You have to stop that eventually,_ he had said, in what Alaric claims was an ill-fitting midnight discussion.

_(Tell Damon,_ he’d told her, _To stop haunting my doorstep at midnight.)_

_(If you let me go over, I will.)_

“It might be hard to get asked this,” He tells her, “But is Katherine really that good of a sister to you?”

“She’s what I have,” Says Elena, “Was Isobel a good wife?”

They will shelf this discussion. She can tell by the way that his hand tightens up on the wheel. He drops her off at the curb a decided length from the front of the house so that Katherine won’t hear the car. _Does that make him feel slighted?_ She wonders. Alaric doesn’t get slighted easily - for heaven’t sakes, he’s not Damon - but she doesn’t want him to be angry. Not if she sees him at school. There are other things, too, like the fact that he helped Katherine raise her, but she doesn’t think about those. Life is already too hard.

“I’m letting you win,” Says Alaric, “Don’t get used to it.”

“Okay,” Says Elena, “I won’t.” She looks out the window, then. Sees a different familiar landscape. “Alaric-”

“I couldn’t prevent it forever,” He tells her, “But you should know, Elena, that I’m getting gray hairs from all this.”

“It is a _great_ house,” She tells him. “It was here since the founding, I think. That’s what Damon told me.”

“ _Damon,_ ” Alaric groans.

“Does it upset you?” She asks him, climbing out of the car, “That Damon killed Isobel?”

“I meant what I said,” Says Alaric.

And Elena closes on the door.

**18**

“Graduation,” She says. She will be spending it lonely. Alaric’s not speaking to her. Katherine is dead. And Damon is visiting Georgia, trying to spark an old flame. Elena doesn’t know why. _Where is everybody?_ She thinks.

“Does it surprise you?” He asks her.

“Kind of,” She tells him, “I didn’t think I would live long enough, if I’m honest.”

There is this moment right before seeing him where everything slams its way in. His compulsions are waves: they’re cool water when they are inside her, but breaking them hurts every time. He told her once that he wouldn’t be made to feel sorry for that, and she had agreed without thinking. She can hate him, she’s learned, without saying anything much. Then it is gone, and Elijah sways in her mirror. He’s wearing a suit like he always does, and she doesn’t know what to say.

“Elena,” He tells her, “Your sister would be very proud.”

“You said that last time,” She tells him, “I don’t want to hear it again.”

Elijah sighs.

“You’re graduating,” He tells her, “You’re right. This calls for happier things.”

“I don’t have happier things.” She whispers, but it’s loud enough that he can hear. And his hands are smoothing her shoulders. Elena is feeling it on her; his gentle, hesitant touch.

“I can think of a few things,” He says.

So can Elena. It’s all of their memories, stitched into a warm bundle. But she will not tell him that, because Elijah already knows. _I’m doing this to keep you safe,_ he’d once told her, _The way Katarina will not._

“I don’t get you, Elijah,” She says.

“What is there for you not to get?”

“This,” Says Elena, “All this. You’re an _Original,_ and you’re - I don’t even know what you’re doing.”

“Making sure you have someone today.”

“I don’t _need_ anybody,” She tells him, and Elijah shakes his head.

“I wish that you wouldn’t say that,” He says. “Do you remember when we first met?”

“I do,” She tells him, “Katherine was still alive.”

She sounds like she’s choking - and she remembers something else that Elijah once told her. _When you say things like that,_ he had said, with his lips at the peak of her hair, _I feel like someone is stabbing me with vervain._

“Graduation,” She tells him, “I - I’m the only one here without parents.”

“Are you -”

“No,” She says, “I’ll be fine. It’s easier, that way, Elijah, you know - to say I don’t need anyone. I mean, it’s not like I _have_ anybody. You know what I think? My parents - Katherine probably killed them. But I’ll never know if that’s true, because she wouldn’t have told anyone.”

Elena,” He says, “Sweet Elena, you know you have me.”

_I have you,_ she thinks, _I have you._ She doesn’t, really - she has him only when he is there, and the rest of the time she’s alone. It makes her want to cling to Elijah. Inhale every breath that he takes. _Give me everything,_ thinks Elena, _If you do that, I’ll take it all._ Elijah’s not lithe, like a panther. He’s solid, and his arms are around her, and he does this _thing_ where he runs his hands up her tear tracts, wiping the pain of them off her and licking them up like they’re blood. _You’re sad,_ he told her, the first time he did it. _What’s made you so sad, sweet Elena?_

_Most things,_ she’d said, _Make me sad._

**47**

“‘ _The Originals are a legend’_ ,” He tells her, “‘ _That should not be tempted by fate.’”_

He’s sleepy from morning - his toes were curled with hers, and that was the coolest place on him, the only one that had felt like she’d thought that a vampire should. It wasn’t like they resisted - they’ve done all of this many times - but it never makes her less guilty. _So much for free will,_ thinks Elena. _It’s not like it_ used _to be real. (_ Elijah, she will think later, would think less of her for saying that, for resigning the part of Elena he loved, but it still doesn’t make her a liar. She’s the Petrova doppleganger. Elena has known that for years.)

“He really didn’t compel you?” He asks, “Search your mind, Elena, for - huh,” He tells her, “The memory you wouldn’t have.”

“You think so little of me,” She murmurs.

“It’s only fair,” Damon says.

She has little hold on the needing. It pulses in her like a second heart, verdant and bloody, yearing to go to its kin. Elena has no idea in the slightest how Damon had ever resisted the pull that she must have been. Even Katherine hadn’t done that. Even _Stefan_ hadn’t done that. He rests on his back, she has noticed, so that hardly anything touches her skin. It is almost as if he’s afraid.

“They’re real,” Says Elena, “I met one.”

“We’ll see what I think about that,” Damon says. A smirk is stretching him open, and she back away out of instinct. _There’s nothing to run from,_ she hears. The voice in her head makes her stop, halting her straight in her tracks. _You have nothing to fear, sweet Elena._ She gets the funniest sense that she’s heard him say it before.

“I can’t,” She says, and when he pulls away, she sees all the pain in his eyes.

“What -”

“I’m sorry,” She says, “I have to go. I won’t kill anyone, but I can’t - I just can’t be here right now.”

_I need to remember,_ she thinks to herself.

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.

**17**

On the list of things that she thinks she is qualified for, Tyler Lockwood duty has to be at the bottom. _He’d kill her,_ Damon’d said, _Caroline. Do you_ want _her blood on your hands?_ She’d have asked him if he wanted hers, but she’d known that the answer, if he had deigned to respond, most likely would have been ‘yes’. He’s dreamed about her. Elena is so sure of it that she doesn’t shake, anymore, when he smirks at her with his fangs. Damon cannot intimidate her. She grew up with someone who didn’t show mercy when killing. Damon, at least, knows that he _should_ think it’s wrong.

“What is it going to be like?” She asks him.

“Pain,” He tells her, “I have to drink aconite. That’s what Mason said.”

_Mason is dead,_ thinks Elena, _He’s rotting inside Damon’s trunk._

“Sounds agonizing,” She says. “Has Caroline told you about vervain yet?”

Tyler gives her a blank look.

“Vervain,” Says Elena, “It’s a natural herb. It’s kind of like vampire wolfsbane. If you ever meet a vampire, take vervain with you. It’s the only thing that’ll save you.”

“Do you -”

She thumbs at her pendant.

“With Caroline?” Tyler asks her.

“With anyone,” Says Elena, “Vampires aren’t exactly known for compassion.”

But Tyler is already looping the chains, and Elena is glad - so _happy,_ she thinks, and so _glad,_ that she is a human. A werewolf’s bite cannot kill her. (It will only be later, years after seeing him turn, that she’ll wish it was Damon instead.)

“I used to be human,” He tells her, as the last of the chains becomes tight.

_So did I,_ she thinks, _So did I._

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“Tyler -”

“I mean it, Elena. Because they wouldn’t tell me. Even _Mason_ wouldn’t tell me. What’s going to happen to me?”

“You’re going to die,” Says Elena. It comes with an absolute certainty to it, “Like it’s the only thing you’ve ever wanted.”

If Tyler can tell through the first drag of howling scream - how good she is at being calm in this world, how flinty she goes when she thinks about Damon, how angry she is at the things he has hidden from her - he says nothing; and betrays, in the gunshot cracking of bones, even less.

**11**

_Am I supposed to be normal?_ She thinks. It’s the kind of thing that she should ask Bonnie. Because everyone’s staring at her, and she hates it like fighting with Katherine. She doesn’t know anyone here. There are Decade Dances and Founder’s Day parties that Katherine won’t let her go to. There’s the elusive _Grill_ off of Main Street where the older kids - and the younger kids, sometimes, too - go to talk smack and shoot pool. Elena will never get offered to join them, and she isn’t accepting of that.

( _Nobody’s normal,_ Damon will tell her, the day that she asks it of him.)

(Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.)

**17**

“Who _are_ you?” Elena is asking. The struggling, she thinks, is futile. He is so much stronger than she is. His arms are as pale as an oak.

“Elena,” He says, “Sweet Elena, you were having a nightmare. Give it a minute, and -”

“Elijah,” She tells him. Flat to her ears, like a singer that’s gone out of key. “Did you -”

“You told me,” Elijah reminds her. “You knew you were taking a risk.”

“Friends don’t make friends forget.”

Elijah shrugs. It isn’t apologetic - or, she thinks, it is, and that is what makes it wrong. He isn’t built to be sorry. Only as sure as she is of the fact that he might want to kiss her. _What would it be like to kiss you?_ She wonders. Nothing like Damon, she knows. He would be gentle with her, and he would not be mad when she left him. He would not begrudge her the comfort she’d run towards and seek, though he would still hate himself after.

“Do you ever sleep?” Asks Elena. It’s the first thing that comes to her mind.

“I’m a vampire, sweet Elena.”

_Then Damon’s a liar,_ she thinks to herself, and guides herself home on the fact. Home, to -

“Alaric’s?” She asks him.

“I thought you might like it here better,” He says, “It was hell, though, to get through the door.”

“I - “ She swallows. There’s a lump in her throat that’s not going away, and she thought that this was supposed to have become a _good_ dream, not a dream where she _cried._ “Thank you,” She tells him, “It is. I haven’t - I haven’t thought about this place in _years._ ”

“You think about it every day,” Says Elijah, “Maybe you just never realized.”

“It does that to you,” Says Elena. She doesn’t quite need to explain. She wishes that he would stop being here. Stop _being_ whatever he is. He knows the shadows too well, she thinks, even by vampire standards. She wonders how old he is.

“Older,” He tells her, “Then you would ever even care to know.”

_As old as I’ll be someday,_ thinks Elena, and his fingers are tilting her up. Elijah’s eyes are the kind of sharp blade that she wishes could kill her tomorrow, instead of making her wait. When he looks at her like that, she just about thinks that he will.

“You have my word,” Says Elijah, “That you’ll be dead long before then.”

“That bad, huh?” Asks Elena, and Elijah’s hand drops. She misses it immediately - his palm wasn’t clammy like hers are. It was smooth as a river-bed stone, and though she has seen larger hands, she had known that if she had sagged her way into it, that one, single palm would’ve held her and all of her weight. But Elena’s face doesn’t drop. It holds her gaze with Elijah’s. He can read her, she thinks, like a book; so she’ll give him something to read. _This is a dream,_ thinks Elena. _It’s my dream; I know you can’t hurt me._

_Bingo,_ she thinks, when it happens. Elijah’s gaze breaks, and the closest she thinks he can get to a wince comes on him. She takes it for what it conveys: _Why would you do this to me?_

“Because,” Says Elena, “I heard that people can die in the dreams. I still have a death wish, you know.”

“Lovely Elena,” He tells her. She loathes how he says her name. “Your mind couldn’t comprehend death.”

“But it can comprehend you,” Says Elena.

“Can it really?” He asks her. She takes a good look around; it is just as she remembered it, this place, as fragmented as Alaric was with Isobel’s name everywhere. Her eyes go then to the doorway. _The stairs,_ she is thinking, _The stairs._

“Did Katherine tell you about it?” He asks her.

“She told me that it was important. To - you know. Do it, now and again.”

Elijah takes a step back.

“She wanted to turn you?” He asks.

“Why do you sound affronted?”

He blinks. A long blink, that lasts for an age; and she gets a sense, then, of just how very old he must be.

“Because,” He tells her, “Nobody could keep you safe.”

“Then I’d do it myself,” Says Elena, “Katherine says that’s our way.”

The pain of it seeps its way out of her into the open. Elena can feel herself sway. It is a forwards motion, and then she is - she is _sobbing,_ and she’s doing it _into_ Elijah, the crisp, white linen of shirt.

“I’m _ruining it,_ ” She tells him. He closes the circle his arms make around her and forces her down to his chest.

“Do you hear that?” He asks her, “That’s what you have that I don’t, sweet Elena, and I intend for you to keep it.”

“Why?” Asks Elena, “Why me?”

“You’re a Petrova,” He says, as if it means nothing to him. As if she means _nothing_ to him.

“You couldn’t,” He tells her, “You do know I wish that you could.”

“I guessed that,” She says, and meets his eyes one last time. “Are you going to make me forget you?” She asks him. He gives her that old, sad smile she’s gotten so good at unraveling.

“It’s not my dream, is it?” She asks him.

“It’s whatever you want it to be,” Says Elijah, “But no, not that, I would hope.”

The window is pouring in coldness when she wakes up, but it can’t touch the namelessness dreaming has snatched from her heart.

**205**

“Mikealson,” She asks him, “Bulgarian?”

“Viking,” He says, “But you weren’t that far off.”

“You said that you’d kill me,” She tells him. “Not even then, I don’t think.”

“How many years has it been?” Asks Elijah.

“Enough,” Says Elena, “Enough.”

And she hopes that he can still read her. _I’m tired, Elijah. I’m old. I don’t want to keep_ living _like this._

“Life,” He says, “Is behind you. All you can do is keep going.”

“Is that what you did?” She asks him.

“It’s what all of us do,” Says Elijah, “Anything else gets you killed.”

“And what if that’s what I want?” Asks Elena. Tastes her own blood in her mouth, and rolls her eyes back in her head. It’s been half a century since she learned how to control her fangs, and they shouldn’t be coming out now.

“Then you’ve finally learned,” Says Elijah, “What it is that makes you beloved.”

“And what would that be?” She asks him - snarls at him, the way that her mouth wants her to, fierce and not hiding, baring her teeth to his sight. He watches it with no expression. She can’t even tell if he does or does not like the show.

“Someday,” He says, “You’ll remember.”

“You and your _somedays,_ ” She tells him, “‘Someday I’ll tell you, Elena.’ ‘Someday I’ll ask you, Elena’. Why can’t you just tell me _now?_ ”

“Patience,” Elijah says, “Is a virtue in us even yet.”

“Don’t say ‘us’,” Says Elena, “I’m not an Original, _‘Lijah._ ”

“It wasn’t my intention,” He says, “And yet, I still could not save you. It is an original tale.”

“Then rewrite it,” She tells him. “Do it. Stake me. Right now.”

She is begging him, incomprehensible. She isn’t speaking like her. She is speaking like Rose when she died, having run for 600 years, with the bite in her blood like car acid. _How long did it take you?_ She wonders, _To know that I didn’t choose this?_

“Less than a day,” Says Elijah, “And every day since then it’s killed me.”

“Nothing can kill you,” She says. _Not even a dagger,_ she thinks.

“Plenty have tried,” He tells her, “But technically, you are right.”

“Is that why you won’t follow through?” Asks Elena. Elijah’s eyes flash their way darker. But she is calm- she knows, now, what he wants. What he’s wanted since the beginning. _I think that we should be friends,_ she had told him.

Now she’s learned it was a lie.

(But life keeps on going, and going, and going, and with it, Elena goes too.)

**17**

Jeremy gives her the sketch on Katherine’s birthday.

“It’s not framed, or anything,” He says, “But I wanted you to know how you look.”

“How do I look?” Asks Elena. If she wasn’t so flustered by him, she’d be ridiculously pleased with the way that she’s got him so nervous.

“You’re _awesome,_ ” Jeremy says - and just like that, thinks Elena, they could be kissing. But it’s Katherine’s birthday, and he has broken her heart. Birthdays mean seeing more Katherine. So she tries to get the perfect grip on the drawing - not so loose that it falls away, but not so tight that it crumples - shoots him a watery smile, and tells him,

“You’re awesome too, Jeremy. You _are._ And I’ll - see you tomorrow, at school?”

“Yeah,” He tells her. She _knows_ that tone. It’s the same tone that Damon likes using. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Elena.’

Elena leaves him behind. When she looks back over her shoulder, she thinks that he looks - upset. _What are you doing to me?_ Thinks Elena, _And couldn’t you just fucking stop?_ Lesson one: She will be who she is every day for the rest of her life, and every day, Katherine will be there, glaring at her from the porch.

“Where were you, Elena?” She asks her.

“I was visiting someone,” She says.

“The Salvatores?” Katherine asks.

“No,” Says Elena, “Happy birthday, sister: I’m not going to tell you.”

“And you were supposed to be _kind._ I got myself something, Elena - come in?”

She was invited, but it is her house. As much her house as Katherine’s. In her house, though, there wouldn’t be blood on the floor.

“Wh - _Alaric?”_

“I seem to recall,” Katherine says, “Telling you to _stay away._ And now look what I’ve done.”

She does not - cannot, will not - let her eyes drift to the ring. It’s the only thing keeping him bound. She can’t hear the wet of his breath coming into his body, but the gasp he coughs up, she can hear that. She’s in front of Alaric before she can think. Before she can do anything, much, otherwise. And Katherine does not move away.

“You’d kill me?” She asks her. “Damon was right - you are a horrible sister.”

“Not your sister, Elena,” Katherine says.

She will never say anything more.

**57**

Isobel’s going to help her. Nothing else matters but that. She can’t count how often she’s thought that, over the course of her life, but this time she knows that it’s true. Isobel’s going to help her, and Isobel’s going to die. She can’t ask for anything more. _What would you do?_ Stefan once asked, _If you could save everybody you loved?_

_Anything,_ she had told him, but the secret wasn’t about that. The secret - the thing that kept making you safe - was that you didn’t do the whole ‘love’ thing. Wasn’t that what Damon had said? And he hadn’t even needed to say it; he had just taught her, the only way he knew how. They worked best when they straddled the line she so loved. When she couldn’t quite tell if they were going to fuck each other or stake each other or bite down and _drink_ until nothing was left in their veins. And then there is Isobel: The woman that isn’t her mother. _Katherine was more of a mother than you,_ thinks Elena. She wonders if Isobel knows.

“You’ve made powerful enemies,” Isobel tells her, “I’d expect nothing less from my blood.” Elena looks at her pointedly, and Isobel chuckles, pink. “No pun intended,” She says.

“You asked about Katherine? Earlier?”

“Yes,” She tells her. “I did. We were very close, your - Katherine and I.”

“Your sister?” Elena asks her.

“I may have heard things around.”

“She raised me,” She tells her, “She died. Nothing else is worth knowing, there.”

“But it was your childhood,” Isobel says, “Your own, _human_ childhood. Don’t you think that your mother might want to know about that?”

“If it wasn’t you then I might.”

“Well spoken,” Isobel tells her, “Next, we can move on to hunting.”

“I drink,” She says.

“Do you kill?”

“I do what I need to,” She tells her, “To keep myself -”

“You’re still human, though,” Isobel says, “And that - that is your weakness. So I’ll make a deal with you, Elena. If I help you - “

“And Damon,” She tells her.

“And _Damon,_ survive, then you’re going to do your mother a favor and turn your humanity off.”

“ _It’s time,_ thinks Elena, _I’m ready to do this again._

(She isn’t, Damon would tell her, but he’s not here to object.)

“I dare you,” Isobel tells her, “It’s fun once you do it, you know.”

“I’m fifty-seven years old,” Says Elena, “I’ve stopped being human before.”

“And then you started again?”

“There were complications,” She says.

“Like what?” Asks Isobel, staring.

“The Originals,” Says Elena. “The Originals wanted me human.”

If it was possible for her to blanch, then Isobel would be blanching.

“You’re met the _Originals_?” She hisses, tightening up fit to run.

“They’re not horrible,” She tells her, “For what they are. I was expecting much worse than I got. Some of them aren’t even cruel.”

“You’re lying to me,” Says her mother. But Elena is much too far gone. The switch is undone, and she’s right where she wants to be.

“I am,” Says Elena, “But look at me, mother. I turned my humanity off. It’s your turn now, _Isobel._ ”

“I’m proud of you,” Isobel tells her. _Afraid,_ Elena thinks, _Good._

If she still had her humanity on, she might’ve slapped her for that.

**19**

Exactly how one goes about doing _this,_ Elena won’t ever quite know. But it’s worth it, she thinks - she has one chance to make things go right with him, and she can’t waste the memory’s heat. Because he’s allowed her to have it to hold it to her like he did, and Elena doesn’t want to mess this up. Still, she hesitates. And when her hand comes up to the door ( _I’m staying at the lake house,_ he had told her. _You can come around, if you’d like.)_ Elena sucks in every morsel of courage that’s left in her bones before knocking.

“Elena,” He tells her. He has not widened, not opened himself to her yet, but she knows that he’s getting close.

“May I come in?” She asks him.

“You’re a human,” He says, “You may go wherever you’d like.”

But Elena will not back down on this.

“Elijah,” She tells him, “I need you to let me come in.”

She’d wondered what it would look like, the moment that he understood, and Elena is not disappointed. He swallows the kind of minute swallow that prefaces wanting and lust - and, if she’s not mistaken, something entirely _else._ Elijah is not wont to wear emotion, and, as in all things, he takes his time watching her there; keeping her there until her skin starts to itch.

“ _Elijah,_ ” She says. He gives her an exasperated sigh.

“You’re going wait all day out there, aren’t you?” He asks her.

“Not if I don’t have to.”

Her voice sounds breath, hushed. There’s a promise in it that Elena won’t dare to envision.

“Then by all means,” He tells her, “Come in, sweet Elena. I am sorry if the protocol isn’t meeting your standards - I’m sure that you must know I’m unused, indeed, to having _friends_ over.”

He sounds almost contrite, to her ears, so Elena plasters a thin veneer of a smile onto her lips, much less than what she wants him to see, but enough for her wits not to flee.

“It’s fine,” She tells him, “I didn’t peg you as a ‘lake cabin’ type of guy.”

“I am many things,” Says Elijah, “And one of them is -”

“You don’t have to,” She tells him. Nineteen years old with her heart like a galloping horse. “You’re my _friend,_ Elijah. I’ll come over whenever you want.”

“Be that as it may,” He says, “I feel - uncomfortable, asking you here. You are young, and I - had hoped that you were less tied to this life than I. Vampires do terrible things. You do not want us as friends.”

“I have pretty good instincts,” She tells him, “And it’s none of your business who I’m friends with, Elijah. I’m perfectly capable of - you know, choosing my own friends myself.”

“I did not -”

“It sounded that way, though,” She tells him. Does not know why she’s hurt when she wants this so badly. This _thing_ that she can’t define.

“I want you safe,” Says Elijah. “Doesn’t that make sense to you?”

“Yes,” Says Elena. She’s hiding a smile, a whine. “I did something stupid, Elijah,” She tells him, not looking him in the eyes.

“Elena - “

“I left my necklace at home. It wouldn’t be a problem, but - my necklace, that’s my vervain.” She grants him the tiniest pinking of cheek before hurriedly rushing along. “You wouldn’t hurt me, Elijah?”

“I would never,” He tells her, “Unless it was necessary.” _To protect my family,_ he’d told her the last time she saw him. How many times, she wonders, have she and Elijah spoken like this to each other? They have never, she thinks, been this open. This revelatory, in person, as they’re finding themselves to be. _I want you to know me,_ she thinks. _I wnat you to know who I am. I’m not the kind of girl who -_

“You are not any kind of girl,” Says Elijah, “You thought that I didn’t know that?”

“You’re old,” Says Elena, “Who knows what you know, Elijah?”

“I -”

“Your family,” She tells him, “I bet they don’t really know either. But that’s - I get the feeling you’re better than they are, at doing the whole ‘secrets’ thing.”

“You have secrets, too,” Says Elijah. “You’re hiding them from me, Elena. There are parts of your mind I can’t see.”

“Does that - does that unnerve you?” She asks him.

“It enthralls me,” He says, “But I wouldn’t say I’m unnerved.”

“I forgot,” Says Elena, “You’ve -”

“I’ve what, sweet Elena? Been there, done that? I give you my word - I have never done _this_ before.”

“Then why aren’t you taking my clothes off?” She asks him - and then she is mortified, backpedaling; wanting, and needing, to run.

“Because,” He tells her, his wrist crossing threshold too easily, “You still haven’t come in. That was very rude of you - I did invite you, remember?”

“I should -”

“Is that what you think I want? I assure you, Elena, that I do not want you to go. You may stay here as long as you wish. This cabin - your people have history here.”

“My people?” She asks him. _And are we really going to stand here and gloss over_ that?

He lets out a low, throaty rumble of laugh.

“Your family,” He tells her, “Your _real_ family, Elena. One of them, at least.”

“Show me,” She asks. For what, she can’t really tell. For knowing her people, if only, if just, for one day. For knowing the feeling of him, as strong as the white oak he told her once grew by his home. For feeling his arms around her, pushing, pulling at the threads that are her form. For making him so much _otherness_ than Elijah, something that does not disguise his aggression from her, who does not care for keeping her safe in the face of all of that pleasure. “Show me,” She asks him.

“I will.”

**17**

“You told me you’d fix it,” She says. It’s the only thing she can think of, and Damon refuses to grace that she’s said it. _He’s thinking about her,_ Elena belatedly realizes. 145 years he has spent, trying not to love Katherine. Now she is naught but a corpse. _It must be hell,_ thinks Elena, _To have to die twice like you do._ She will not grace Damon either.

“What the _fuck,_ ” He asks, “Did you think you were doing?”

“She was deranged,” Stefan says, “She was going to kill -”

“He isn’t my father,” She says. She can taste Katherine’s blood in her throat. “He had a Gilbert ring, Stefan.”

His name from her sounds like she’d thought it would sound; like stepping on broken glass. There is nothing _nice_ in Elena, no sweetness reserved for this less-than-man who left her sister behind. Elena refuses to know him. And if, someday, she gets out of this town, she’ll never think about Stefan. He will be nothing to her; not even a ghost in her head. She’ll forget him just like he’s compelled her.

“It needed to happen, Damon,” He says, “For Elena’s sake, if not ours.”

“ _Elena_ needed somewhere to live, and grow up, and - “

“And have all those things done to her?” Stefan asks, “The ones that you told me about while you drank yourself silly because she was being abused?”

“What are you -”

“Shut up, Elena,” He says. “She’s right, I made her a promise. So you’re going to leave us now, brother.”

“Damon -”

“I’m older than you. I’m stronger than you. And I know Elena better than you ever will. Do you want Stefan gone?” He asks her. She nods so violently she thinks she’ll snap her own neck.

“You heard her,” Damon says, “Go.”

**19**

She is nineteen years old when Elijah comes into her dreams. She stands in a hallway of white, lined in gold roses and scant lines of black in a language that she does not know.

“Old English,” He tells her, “Not very common, these days.”

He is, as always, inscrutable, but Elena thinks he can tell that she knows what the dreaming must mean.

“I lost her,” She tells him, “My sister.”

“I figured as much,” Says Elijah.

“Tell me the truth?” Asks Elena, “How did you know about me?”

“Does it matter how?” Asks Elijah. She is glad that he’s taken her here. If it weren’t for Elijah, Damon would be her escort. She’s not of the Founders - they don’t even want her to win - but Katherine says it’s important, keeping appearances up. Still, she hates things like this. Pageants and dances and every time that she has to pretend. She wonders, sometimes, if the stakes are too high, in this life that her sister has built. Her sister, she thinks, who is -

“I almost forgot,” Says Elena. It is about the intimacy, she remembers, of almost, but not quite, touching. He has it down to a science: Elijah’s heat is a welcome distraction from swallowing bitter vervain. She used to take it for Katherine’s sake, but now she does it for Damon and Caroline Forbes. For all of the people who’ve died so that she can be safe - ironic, she thinks, since Elijah is standing right here. If she had to guess, she would never have pegged him as anything other than this. Every taut line of him tells her that he’s one of them; and nobody else has a clue. There is Bonnie, the girl that she used to be friends with, steel-jawed since going, that last time, to Salem. There is Tyler Lockwood in a suit that belies his fatality. And there, in the far-most corner, is the woman who once owned their house. The woman that Katherine killed, exchanging barbs with Jeremy’s uncle.

“That is the point, sweet Elena.”

“Maybe for you,” Says Elena, “But doesn’t it ever get hard?”

She could never ask this to Damon - never admit how bad, sometimes, she wants to die. If she died, thinks Elena, then no one else would, and she’d not have to feel this again. They have moved to the part of the dance where the actual _dancing_ takes place, and her weak limbs feel heavy and wanton. _Wanton,_ she thinks, _For someone who’s trying to kill me._ It isn’t the first time, her traitorous body reminds her. She’s been wanton towards killers for years. And somehow it’s reassuring to think that this time, at least, it is nobody’s death save her own.

“Hard?” Asks Elijah, “That’s what you’re worried about?”

“No,” She says, “But it seems like a good place to start.”

She thinks he agrees with her, finally.

“How old _are_ you, Elijah?” She asks him. The creek spray is coming in fast, and storm clouds are gathering low. It isn’t that creepy, she thinks, when you’ve lived here for all of your life. If real people knew what kinds of things lived in the forest -

“Over a thousand years old,” Says Elijah, “And I think that I know what you’re asking. You want to know, sweet Elena, if feelng things ever gets easier.”

“And?” Asks Elena.

“Feeling gets worse every day.”

His arms are like an umbrella around her, spinning her faster and fast. Her heartbeat is jumping just like the tic of a jaw. The sky is pouring down rain, but it’s comforting to her. Something that keeps her alive. Something that’s keeping her _real._ Because if she can feel it, that means it might happen sometime, and Elena can wait for that day; when she’s dancing out here with Elijah, and talking to him like a friend. It sometimes yet stuns her how much he’s revealed of himself, to a person who’s so integral. But then she remembers that he will just make her forget, and it hits her. Right where it hurts, with more than the usual _pang._

“How do you live with it, then?” Asks Elena. They’re back in her bedroom. She’s never danced here before, but the surplus lights are turned on, and a candle’s set out on the nightstand. It smells like the soap that Katherine once washed the sheets in. Like everything that Elena has lost, and all that she has yet to lose.

“By living,” He tells her, “There’s nothing else you can do.”

“You’re not being helpful,” She says. She pulls herself out and he lets her; allows her to break his strong grip. But she hasn’t thought this plan through - her feet are in scramble, and the rug’s being yanked out beneath her. It feels like it did that day when she was sixteen, except this time, Elijah is helping her up.

“Forgive me,” He tells her, “I only meant not to worry yourself with such things until a time comes when you need to.”

“And what if that time is now?” Asks Elena, “Elijah, what about now?”

He raises an eyebrow at her. She has lost, but she knew she would lose. Caroline Forbes was a better Miss Mystic Falls than Elena could ever have been.

“Now,” Says Elijah, “You let yourself go to the dream.”

“What dream?” She asks him, “The dream where there aren’t any vampires?”

“Is that what you’d like to dream?” Asks Elijah, and she shakes her head too hastily. “Why not, sweet Elena? Don’t you wish that your life could be normal?”

“If my life were normal,” She tells him, “It wouldn’t be worth living at all. I wouldn’t know you, and Damon - Damon wouldn’t have anyone, and - And someday, you would still kill me.”

“Yes,” Says Elijah, “I would.”

“So it’s better to know that it’s coming.”

“Better,” He tells her, “But harder. Have you ever heard just how very brave you’ve become?”

“Once or twice,” Says Elena, though no one has told her as much. She thinks that Damon might want to; that Alaric started to, once, before quickly closing his mouth. ( _He isn’t your father,_ Elena’d reminded herself. _Katherine?_ He’d asked, seeing her.)

“If you could wish for one thing,” She asks him, “What would you wish for, Elijah?”

He stares at her deeply. The water is rising between them, and the water is laced with vervain. But it does not burn Elijah. Elena’s skin is the tapestry catching on fire. She sees the boils and marks coming in. It feels like her skin’s being flayed. So she takes the steps of the old, burning farmhouse in twos, until she is safe above level. There’s somebody’s head on the ground.

“I would wish,” The Original tells her, “That I’d never met Tatia Petrova.”

“What about me?” Asks Elena.

“What about you?” He asks, “You are wholly, entirely you. You are Elena Petrova, and none of this is your fault.”

“All of it’s my fault,” She tells him. Her voice has gone hoarse, and she wonders if it will ever sound lovely again. If it sounded that way to begin with, or if everyone lied when they told her they thought she was kind - that they were happy she’d come, and oh, how she looked like her sister. “Everything wrong with this town.”

“You put too much blame on yourself,” Says Elijah. “Why do you do that, Elena?”

“Somebody has to,” She says.

“Then you have proven me right,” The Original says. “You are nothing like Tatia Petrova, and even less like Katerina.”

“That’s something,” She says. And in the moment before she wakes up, she thinks that Elijah might kiss her; might lean in closer and bridge that slim gap that has always been present between them. She wouldn’t mind it, and if Damon would kill her for kissing Elijah, she wouldn’t remember to tell him.

“Elijah,” She tells him, in the moment before he compels her, but Elijah is tracing her face.

“Remember,” He asks, “What I promised you once?”

“That I’ll be long dead,” Says Elena, “Before I’m as old as you are.”

“A thousand years,” Says Elijah, “You’d be shocked how fast they’ve gone by. So much can happen, Elena, when one thousand years have gone by. That’s how you live with yourself. By knowing, someday, you won’t have to.”

“Do you think like that?” Asks Elena.

“Whenever I can,” Says Elijah. She takes this last glimpse of his face, with all of its edges. The softness he wears just for her.

“Will I remember you, someday?” She asks him.

“When you’re ready,” He tells her, “You’ll know everything that ever was.”

( _I’m ready, Elijah,_ she tells him. She is almost two hundred years old, and the blood in her veins is like sandpaper rubbing a wound.)

( _No,_ he tells her, _You’re not._ )

**31**

“I think we should talk about leaving,” He says.

“And I think we shouldn’t,” She tells him.

Elena is young, and she doesn’t like leaving the house. There’s not enough of her to trust, and Damon knows just as well. _You never knew what it’s like,_ she’d once told him, _Never having a family._ He had looked at her like she had shot him. _Elena,_ he’d said, _You have me._ They had both known that this didn’t count.

“Why would we leave?” Asks Elena. “Mystic Falls is my home. You’ve done well enough here.”

“Yes,” He tells her, “Because I _left_ for awhile. What will people say, do you think, when thirty years have gone by and little Ms. Pierce doesn’t look as if she’s aged a day?”

“They’ll say that I have good skin,” Says Elena, “Just like Katherine did. I’ll tell them I moisturize, Damon.”

He scoffs.

“Look,” He tells her, “Elena. I get that you don’t want to leave, and I’m not saying that we’ll leave tomorrow. But I need you to think about it. This staying in Mystic Falls thing? It isn’t an option, for us, at this point.”

“Us?” Says Elena, “What ‘us’ are you talking about?”

“ _Elena,_ ” He says. A warning, she thinks, that she would take caution to head.

“I’ve told you,” She tells him, “I’m grateful for all of the help, but I’ll be fine on my own.”

“You can’t look at people without wanting to tear them apart.”

“Exactly,” She says, “And once I learn to control it, feel free to leave Mystic Falls.”

“I’m not leaving without you,” He tells her.

And later, she thinks, she will finally understand him. He is Damon Salvatore, and he loves her because he has no other choice but to do it. For him, it will always be her. That’s why he’ll do them, those things that he knows she might still hate him for when she is a hundred years old and her hair should long have gone gray. Elena can’t choose who loves her any more than she can who she loves. And neither, she’ll know, can Damon. What she knows of it now though is one thing and one thing alone: Mystic Falls is her home.

“I’m not leaving without you,” He says.

“Then I guess you’re not leaving at all.”

“Too much has happened,” He tells her - a final, desperate attempt. And maybe Damon is right. Too much _has_ happened here. Stefan touched her and left her and turned Katherine into a body. Tyler’s a werewolf and Jon Gilbert opened the tomb. Alaric’s vampire wife is her _mother._

But Mystic Falls is her _home._

_We’ll be safe there,_ Katherine once told her, when she was eleven years old.

Elena knows she was right.

**17**

“I don’t understand,” Says Elena.

“And maybe,” Caroline tells her, “Maybe you don’t really need to?”

“How are you-”

“Seriously, don’t ask.”

“Okay,” Says Elena, “Okay. But it wasn’t - Just tell me that it wasn’t Damon?”

Caroline gives her the side-eye. She isn’t used to it, coming from Caroline Forbes. Of all people, _Caroline Forbes?_

“Matt is going to kill you,” She says.

“Who cares about Matt?” The new-born vampire asks her. “It isn’t like we were dating.”

Caroline doesn’t _do_ the whole dating thing, as she’s explained to Elena about five hundred seventy times. It’s better to just fool around. No strings attached. As if _that_ could ever turn out well. Elena wonders sometimes if Caroline’s really a Forbes. She doesn’t act like a Forbes; she’s not anything like her mother, unless she can’t help it at all. And she doesn’t act like a vampire, either. It suits her, being a bloodsucker, Elena has to admit.

“Who else knows?” She finds herself asking. Caroline hangs her head down.

“Damon,” She tells her, “And Stefan. Tyler.”

“Tyler Lockwood?” She asks.

“He - has his own things going on.”

“What kind of things?” Asks Elena.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“You’re a vampire,” Says Elena, “I live with my _vampire_ sister.”

“What do you think about werewolves?” Caroline asks her.

“I hadn’t,” She tells her, “At all.”

**23**

Damon drinks with Alaric. He’s trying to fix things - that’s what he says, when she asks why he still tries to do it. _Then stop,_ Says Elena. _If he wants to fix things, Alaric can see me himself._

“Elena,” He tells her, “You know that Alaric can’t help it. You’re - you’re like a daughter to him. Can’t you imagine how hard this must be?”

( _Isobel,_ he told her, _My wife. She went missing, it was years ago now. I don’t know what happened to her.)_

_(_ It wasn’t the only lie that he’d told, but there’d never been a good time, thinks Elena, when she could have asked him the rest.)

“Since when were you the voice of reason?” She asks him. “You turned me into a vampire, Damon. Were you thinking about how hard it would be for him then?”

They’ve never talked about this. About Damon, and what he has done. It had not seemed worth it to her. But it’s been three years without talking about it; three years of it poisoning her, and Elena’s about had enough.

“What right did you have?” She asks him, “To make that choice for me, Damon?”

“I love you,” He tells her, “What other choice could I have made?”

“I don’t know,” Says Elena - and she knows, then, that she truly doesn’t. “The one that I would’ve made.”

“And what one would that be?” He asks her, tiptoeing close. When she was nineteen, she asked him, again, to compel her. When she was nineteen, he’d complied. They never talked about that, either, whatever he’d seen that had made him recoil so sharply, and Elena thinks they never will. “You would’ve just let yourself die?”

“Nobody dies,” Says Elena. It comes out of nowhere. A warm place inside of her soul that she’d like to go back to, sometime. “Nobody real ever leaves you, Damon. Not it you want them to stay.”

“Katherine left,” Damon says. It’s the worst example that he could’ve ever come up with, but Elena is ready for this. She’s been ready, she thinks, for years.

“You know I’m not Katherine,” She tells him.

( _And oh,_ she thinks, _Does it burn._ )

**254**

When she was a very young girl, she wondered about it, the world. What it would be like when she and hers were long buried and longer yet dead. She heard once that nobody’s right about it, the future. Vampires, she thinks, as she crosses the high-rail that used to be Wickery Bridge, are less right than anyone else. She remembers the riots in 2060, the way that the media’d stooped to call them ‘extinction’. And she remembers theclimate change rallies; the way she had fought with the humans so that their lives might be spared, not so that they could live them, but so she would have something to eat. She’d felt more like Katherine then than she thinks even Katherine had. A cruel, hollow shell of a girl that might once have been human. Humanity, she thinks - that thing everyone wants to keep. She wonders now not of her future, but of why she had thought, for even one minute, that it could’ve been something she wanted.

Mystic Falls looks different, now that it isn’t a town. She comes back here, sometimes, when she can, to watch that town where she grew up which the big city slaughtered and razed. She can see the Mystic Grill in the stacking blocks of connected apartments. Taste Damon’s cologne in the banks upon banks of receivers netted out to the Complex. She remembers the day when the internet died, and the man who it left on the run. She’d wanted, one day, to meet him. Extend him what help she could. But of all the things that Elena had lost, she carried that one thing with her:

She would not let another human live the way that she did.

There are teenagers, out here, hiking the rail. They have snuck away from their nighttime campuses, stolen their parents’ cheap liquor. Elena Petrova watches them hiking the high-rail, the time blaring off of their wrists. Their blood is still so fresh, and so human, to her. They remind of her and Jeremy Gilbert skipping out to smoke in the cemetery; back in the days when bodies were buried and she’d foolishly thought he might love her. They are blonde haired and long haired and burning their whole lives away, just like the old o-zone layer. _I want to know you,_ Elena thinks out to the dark.

In the end all she’ll know is the taste of their blood in her teeth.

“There’s nobody left,” Says Elena.

“Do you want me to give you a medal?” Rebekah Mikaelson asks.

They don’t get along. There’s too much betrayal, too many chances they’ve wasted, to be here like this. But they have an uneasy truce, she thinks, for Klaus’s sake more than anyone’s.

“Do you remember what it was like?” Asks Rebekah, “Or have you already forgotten? That’s the thing with you humans, Elena; you always want what you can’t have. It’s like an obsession with you.”

_I’m not human,_ she thinks. Elena is not an Original, but she gets the sense that Rebekah remembers it too. There are some things, she’s learned, that you can’t ever forget, not even when you’ve been alive for so long that it might as well not be a rumor. There are people who know about them, still, but they’ve kept themselves hidden too well. _We have doomed ourselves to the night,_ Rebekah’s brother once told her. _Now we can’t leave it at all._ She doesn’t wear a daylight ring, anymore. It seems like a small price to pay, for the monster that Katherine has made.

“You hunt in the shadows,” She hears.

“It’s easier for me,” She tells her. Rebekah laughs; a harsh laugh, she thinks, that’s not so very unwelcome.

“In some ways it is,” She agrees, “But loving someone must be hell.”

“I don’t do that,” Elena says, “Love.”

( _Because of Damon,_ she thinks to herself, when she is alone in the daytime, holed up inside of hotel rooms. Feeling his blood dripping wet on her hands and the stench of hot kerosene. _Because I could never have saved him._ But it is also because of Alaric; because of Jeremy Gilbert; because of somebody whose name she can barely remember unless she focuses _hard,_ who put his arms ‘round her and would not lie to her face. _The truth can be painful,_ he might once have said, _But that doesn’t make it a tragedy._ These days, she thinks, he was nothing more than a dream.)

“We make our own tragedies,” Elena says now.

“What are you, some kind of philosopher?”

She isn’t. She had tried to take classes, once, for it, but college life hadn’t suited her, any, and she hated to stay in one place. Damon’d been right about that: once you got the taste for running, not even sunlight could burn it away. _Damon,_ she thinks, as she watches the teenagers kiss. _What would you think about me?_ He wouldn’t say she’s done well for herself; no one can say that to her. But he’d fight her about something stupid. Take her mind off of things, for awhile.

“You really did love him,” She says, with a snort. “Who would’ve thought it, Petrova? He’s nothing special, you know.”

“Don’t talk about Damon that way.” It isn’t a plea, or a beg, or a seeking out of salvation. It is nothing at all but an old argument she rehashes to keep herself sane, but Rebekah’s look makes her skin crawl.

“I wasn’t talking,” She tells her, “About the Salvatore brothers.”

“Then who were you talking about?”

“You really don’t _know_?” Asks Rebekah. She sounds too happy for it to mean anything good. _I could make you destroy her,_ Rebekah had told Damon once. But she’d never needed him for it. The look in eyes tells Elena that she’ll be destroying her _now._ That somebody’s done it all for her; someone that she doesn’t know. _I want you to leave me alone,_ thinks Elena, but she cannot say it out loud. There are so few of them left. She remembers the day that Mystic Falls burned to the ground; that tragic, reprehensible day. She remembers the way that the flames looked, reaching out with their orange-gold fingers to put her thin form in a chokehold. _I held my hand out for you,_ she sometimes screams, at the place where his grave should have been. _And you didn’t take it, how could you?_

_How could you?_ she thinks. _How could you really have loved me, when there was nothing left of me to love? How could you really have loved me when I was just Katherine’s pawn?_ And now there’s a new doubt, a seed spreading outwards and outwards.

_How could you really have loved me?_ She thinks, _When I loved somebody else?_

**199**

She sleeps on a bed made of feathers and fur, with the roar of a fire beside her. It is not Elijah - it can’t be Elijah - but she will take what she can get. When she wakes, she knows who he is. Elena _knows_ who he is. He is more to her, now, than hazy half-images stolen back in the dark. She thinks, even, that he’s something more than she’d ever thought that he could be. But what did she think he could be, she wonders? Someone who loves her? She had had Damon for that. Still, the way that he’d done it; carrying her to the bed like the lightest, most intact feather. Kissing her soft on the forehead before he turned out the lights. It makes her think about things that she shouldn’t. Things that she, now, also remembers.

They need to talk about it.

They cannot talk about it.

She _won’t_ let them talk about it.

“How long am I going to stay here?” Elena asks, plodding into the kitchen, ripping into a blood bag. Elijah drinks his like a civilized man, heated up in a brown clay mug that he seats on an old, fraying coaster, but she likes the blood this way better. It reminds her of being young in that particular way - when youngness, itself, was the gift of sweet oblivion. Damon had let her, she thinks. She knows that he’d not wanted to.

“As long as you’d like,” Says Elijah. She looks so _ridiculous,_ she thinks. He is writing inside of a _journal._

“You’re laughing at me,” He says.

“Not laughing,” She tells him. “Remembering things.”

“You should get a journal,” Elijah suggests. “I’ve found that it helps me, writing things down.”

“So you don’t forget?” Asks Elena.

“So I don’t have to remember.”

Elijah is making a _picture,_ she thinks. It isn’t one that she should notice. How is he perfect already, she wonders, this early on in the day? It only reminds her to check. It is two in the afternoon. She has slept for seventeen hours. She was seventeen when she met him, she thinks. Wonders what that could mean. If it couldbe worth it, to take her blood bag and sit at the table with him; brushing his foot with her ankle, feeling the cool of his skin. Elena is glad that he’s wearing a suit; she can _deal_ with him wearing a suit. All of those layers are so much effort, and she is too tired for that. The suits are his armor, she figured out once. She wishes she had some of that. And then she remembers, almost at a fault -

“Elijah?” She asks him, “Could you - Could you help me with something?”

“Anything,” Says Elijah, with a quickness that should frighten her.

“I want you to give me a haircut,” She says.

Knows that he knows, without her having to say it, that she just can’t live with herself, anymore, looking like Katherine does.

( _You’re a fool,_ she will think, but it will not matter to her.)

( _You will_ always _look like your sister.)_

(She will tell herself, when she thinks it, that she does not need to care. _My sister,_ she’ll think, and hold herself tighter together, _I didn’t_ have _one of those.)_

_(But you did,_ thinks Elena.)

_(You did._ )

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, a glimpse into my headspace while writing this chapter through four songs I kept on replay: 
> 
> _An Gaidheal's a Leannan_ by Mary Ann Kennedy and Na Seòid
> 
> _Uncle_ by Nicole Dollanganger
> 
> _17_ by Jade Bird
> 
> And, finally, 
> 
> _Gone and Found_ by MØ


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Notes: I think I said while posting my earlier fic that I had some things going on that made it hard to keep getting work done for some time on the fics that I'm working on right now, and for anyone reading this story who did not see my apology there, I will start off this A/N by saying that I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience those things may have caused. But rest assured - I have _not_ given up on this story. In fact, as of now, I've finished it, and am planning on posting the next chapter of my other ongoing TVD fic _and_ the finale to this story this Friday! I appreciate the understanding of everyone who's stuck with this story in regards to the wait, and I hope that the finale makes all that waiting worthwhile for you. I've really enjoyed writing this story, and I'll be sad when it's over and done with. **
> 
> **That being said, this chapter of the story serves was also very fun for me to write. I tried to delve deeper into lots of things we saw in the last chapter as well as set up the ending of the story in the next chapter, which will be focused(mainly) in the same time period. For those of you who have been following this oddly formatted monstrosity, you should know what I mean by that. This chapter still takes place over many time periods, and sets the stage for what happens there. (Also, there's more Elijah in this chapter, so that's fun!)**
> 
> **As always, let me know what you think of this chapter down below in the comments. Getting feedback helps me learn and grow as a writer, and is much appreciated, as well as your continual support for this story! And stay tuned for the traditional four songs that were stuck in my head while I wrote this.**

**17**

He pulls her aside after class. _Class,_ thinks Elena _._ How can school still be important?

“Elena,” He tells her, “Would you mind staying after, a few?”

_No,_ she is begging to tell him, _What could you possibly say?_ She knows she looks lanker, more sallow, today, than in all the years that he’s known her. She skipped out on TA period. And the looks that the rest of them give her - they make her wish she could die. The funeral won’t be that large, but she knows that the whole town will come, and all of them will say sorry. She does not want to hear _sorry._ Nobody’s _sorry_ that Katherine is dead. They wouldn’t be, not if they knew who she was. Alaric is no exception.

“Who told you?” She asks him.

“Vicki,” He says, and her eyes go wide like blown glass.

“Matt’s sister, Vicki?”

“She cares about you, Elena.”

“I’ve never spoken to her.”

It is a lie, but Elena can’t make herself stop it. She’s spoken to Vicki a few times, helped her cry in the bathroom, but nothing that signifies _caring._ Vicki’s a person, just like anyone else. Sometimes she just needs a hand. Vicki has offered her drugs, but she’s never taken it up. Katherine would’ve just _known._ And also, Vicki is beautiful. Pretty in how she’s sad. _I’m a fuck-up,_ she’d told her, and that wasn’t wrong, but she had a face that an artist would kill to be able to draw. They’d met long before that, at Jeremy’s house, because Vicki was Jeremy’s friend. They’d known each other for years, for as long as he’d lived in the Falls, as he liked to call it, because it had ‘worked out like that’. There was nothing between them except for the pills that they shared. (She had looked into Jeremy’s sketchbook, one time. He hadn’t drawn Vicki _once._ )

“She cares about you, Elena,” He tells her. “You make people wonder, alright?”

“Don’t you have class?” Asks Elena, and Alaric huffs on a sigh.

“You should talk to somebody,” He tells her, “I know there are problems, but Katherine was still your sister.”

“I get it,” She tells him, “I know.”

“Then why don’t you do it?” He asks her. She is aware that they’re having a moment - a father-daughter type _moment,_ she might have called it, if she’d ever had one of those. “I know there are people who still want to help you, Elena.”

“Like who?” Elena asks, “Damon?”

“I don’t care much for Damon, you know that. But yes, Elena - If you talked to him, I think that Damon would help you.”

“You’re a liar, Alaric,” She tells him.

“I just wanted to tell you,” He says. “You can do whatever you want.”

When she walks out of the classroom and sees Vicki Donavan waiting, she thinks that she does quite loathe fate.

**16**

A day at the Council, he tells her. She can’t stand the balancing act; Damon says that’s why she shouldn’t. He’s too close to Jonathan Gilbert. But still, she thinks, Jeremy’s _called_ her, and nobody’s ever done that.

“My uncle’s out,” Jeremy says. “Would you maybe like to come over?”

She is there before she can blink. Panting her breaths because she’s been running too fast, and his lips twitch up when he sees her.

“Elena,” He tells her.

“Jeremy… let me inside?”

She stands on his doorstep a minute, chest heaving and back dripping sweat. She can smell what he smells like already. Ruin and rust and the softness of losing too much. Neither of them have a family; not really, she thinks, when she thinks about things like that. But someday, they’ll have each other, and that will be more than enough. Jeremy’s tallness can fill up a door frame like nobody else that she’s met. Nobody looks at her funny when Jeremy’s by her side; they aim all their glances at him. And Elena thinks that she could live in it, the feeling of Jeremy’s lips, when he finally decides to kiss her.

“Sure,” He tells her, “Come in.”

She is inside the house and he’s telling her, like all the rest of them do,

“You don’t have to ask every time.”

“Katherine says it’s polite.”

“Katherine,” He tells her. “I still wanna meet her sometime.”

Elena shakes her head quickly.

“You’ve met my uncle,” He tells her, “Come on, Elena, fair’s fair.”

“Katherine won’t like you,” She tells him. “She’ll ask us to stop meeting up.”

“Then let me convince her,” He says. He’s pouring her water, and she wrinkles her nose when she drinks. She can spit it out later, she thinks, so that Katherine won’t smell the vervain. She cannot tell him she knows; Jeremy doesn’t know about Damon, what happened in 1864. It isn’t his world, and she’s grateful for the chance to be smart like she is, so that she isn’t happy for that. _You can’t live here,_ Damon once told her, _If you want to know about us._ That’s what she’s grateful for. The chance to prove Damon wrong. He’ll know what she’s grown up with, someday, but today he’s entirely hers.

“I wanted to ask you,” He says, when she’s drained her glass. He’s good at not watching too closely; but then again, thinks Elena, it is true that he doesn’t _know._ “More about her, your sister.”

“She’s Katherine,” Says Elena, “There isn’t that much to say.”

“But she raised you,” Jeremy tells her, “What must that have been like?”

“It’s the look-alike thing, isn’t it?”

That’s what most people think. _You look too much like your sister,_ she’s heard, so many times in a row.

“It’s a you thing,” Jeremy tells her, “But the look-alike thing’s kind of weird.”

“Genetics are weird,” Says Elena, “There isn’t that much to say.”

“Alright, alright,” He tells her, “This time, I’ll let you win.”

They are halfway through watching a movie when Elena shifts closer to him; feels his arm drape around her. It is one golden moment when everything just feels _right._ It’s vintage, tonight, because Jeremy likes them like that, and the subtitles blur past her eyes. If she fell asleep right now, Elena thinks Katherine might kill her. But it isn’t worth it, not in the daytime or night. Dreams are louder than vampires are, but they’re no less deadly to her. She forces herself to sit up on Jeremy’s lap. To fight for him, just that one little bit.

“Wanted it louder,” She says. The light’s hitting Jeremy’s face, and she thinks that he does look so _much._ Not anything, she thinks, like Damon.

“Pause it,” He tells her, weaving his spell over her, “And tell me about her, Elena.”

But what is there to say about Katherine? _She is my sister,_ Elena won’t tell him, _But nobody else thinks she is. They might be right about that. She’s the only thing that I have. I don’t know why we look so alike, but I know that she isn’t alive._

“There isn’t that much to say,” Says Elena.

“Then maybe we should stop talking,” Jeremy tells her.

“I can do that,” She tells him, and this. _This right here’s_ what it feels like, falling in love.

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.

**63** ****

“How many years can you give me?”

“As many as you want to have.”

“How many years _will_ you give me?”

His face is hollow from hunger. His shape is, still, coffin-stiff. She’s rarely thinks twice about anything that she does - She cannot love Damon as fiercely as Damon loves her, but she’s learned that she _can_ make him proud.

The warlock says,

“Eighty-five.”

**17**

She sleeps in a Salvatore’s bed. It should matter, she thinks, which one, but Katherine said once - in a fit of blind, drunken rage that Elena has just now remembered - that everything they are’s the same. It isn’t, she thinks. They are not the same person. They have never been the same man. And if she’s wrong for thinking it, what else is she wrong to think? Damon sleeps in luxury sheets. His presence, to her, is a fence. She doesn’t know how it started, but she can’t tell him to leave. Not when she loves him so close. She doesn’t get it, being this close to somebody; it isn’t something she’s meant for, but she’s drowning in it all the same. It’s been over a month since Katherine died, and Elena could stay here forever.

“What do you think?” Damon asks, when Elena is fully awake. She doesn’t know if he’s asking her what she thinks about Katherine or what she thinks about them. She’s too lost on either to give him a formal opinion; wishes that she could ask someone, anyone, how she is supposed to feel.

Vicki tells her that there is no ‘right way’ to feel. _Feeling,_ she tells her, _Is bullshit. Like, take some drugs, ‘Lena, come on._ They will never be close - it is too late to build the new friendship - and Vicki will too soon be dead, if Damon has any say. _I don’t know why you want to kill her,_ she’d told him, when Damon had fought her on it. _She hasn’t done anything wrong._

_She’s making you different,_ He’d told her. _Elena, you’re growing_ complacent.

_No one will hurt me,_ She’d said.

Katherine was dead, and she was supposed to be safe now. But there’s an old saying Elena once heard. _Man plans,_ it said, _And God laughs._ She still doesn’t think that there is one, but she hopes that her sister’s in hell. She has driven her here. Being a human, being a vampire; she did not ask for either of these, but she’s asked even less to be Damon’s. _I don’t belong to you,_ she tells the Boarding House mirror. She thought it was real, for a very long time, the myth about seeing reflections. What kind of a reflection would he have, she’d wondered. What would he see when he looked? Elena sees worms and leaves and a million dead, rotting things crawling out from her skin. And late at night, Damon touches that skin. Nothing more than the lightest of swift, feral grazes, nothing that she could lean into, and she thinks, sometimes, about what all those dead things must feel like. Elena’s not broken, she’s breaking, she thinks.

They are very different things.

**18** ****

“I did it,” She tells him. “Elijah, I did it, I - _Fuck._ ”

He doesn’t mind swearing. Elena knows he never has. She is eighteen years old and she’s graduated. The world is at her fingertips, and the spin of it’s making her dizzy.

“Is it strange?” She asks him, “To feel like I should be dead?”

“Considering your life,” He tells her, “I don’t think anything’s strange.”

**57**

“That was a cruel trick,” Isobel says. Elena won’t look at her dying. She isn’t doing it quickly. They’re hell, she’s seen, werewolf bites, and he still doesn’t know that she’s here.

“I did what I had to,” She tells her, “I thought you’d be proud of me, mother.”

“Pride,” Scoffs Isobel Saltzman. “Pride doesn’t mean anything.”

“Neither does love,” Says Elena, “But guess what I’m doing it for?”

_Love yourself,_ Katherine once told her. _Nobody else, but let yourself have that. Just so you know how it feels._ She hadn’t, Elena thinks, Katherine. There were friendships, acquaintances, even love-making sometimes. But love must be built on more than just making it, and it’s hard when you find yourself cleaved. _I won him,_ she thinks, on her worst days, _That man that you couldn’t love. Do you know how much he loved you? Come back and I’ll tell you sometime._

After all of these years, thinks Elena, she should not want Katherine alive.

(Wanting, though, is a world borne unto itself.)

“I know what you’re doing it for.”

“You don’t,” Says Elena, “When will you think that I’m Katherine?”

“A day,” She tells her, “An hour.”

“And what do you want me to do?”

“Really?” Isobel asks her.

“You’re still my mother,” She says.

“Even if you never had me?”

“Yes,” She says, “Even then.”

“I want you to keep being this,” Isobel tells her, “And I want you to tell me - if Alaric was happy, back then.”

“He was happy,” She says. Feels herself crying, but not because of what’s human. “He missed his wife every day.”

“And what about you?” Asks her mother. They could be talking, still. Sipping on coffee, not blood. “Who do you miss, every day?”

“I miss Elena,” She tells her. It’s the cruelest thing she can think of. The only gift she has left for Isobel. The shape of her daughter, that girl that she failed, which she’ll force her to take to the grave.

“Then find her,” Isobel says.

“And then what?” She asks.

“Then,” Says her mother, as her eyes begin fluttering closed, “Then, you go find yourself.”

**19**

She thinks that she’ll never get used to it, waking up in his bed. _You have time,_ thinks Elena. When she bites on her lip, she can taste her hot, human blood. And she knows, too, that Elijah has tasted her blood - even in all that restraint, she had wanted him to taste her blood, to know she had something that did not belong to Katherine. The morning light creeps through the half-open window, and she rolls to cover his body, shielding him, without one second thought, from the danger it holds for his kind.

“Elena,” He says. A low, drowsy note while he wakes. “You’re -”

“It’s not hard to tell,” Says Elena. Her gaze has gone downcast, and her already weak knees are starting to falter and doubt. He is her oldest, noblest friend, and she’s woken up in his bed. She had thought, when she slept, that the covers were warm. But that had just been Elijah. She realizes now that she’s cradled inside of his grasp, and his tight grip is gentle on her. If she pulled out enough, he would let her get up, slip away. Strangely, she doesn’t want to. His fingers are better, she thinks, then even the heaviest blanket.

They mean more to her, anyway.

After all, she thinks, he is _Elijah._ And if Damon kills her - which, knowing Damon, he might - then she thinks that it will have been worth it, for just this one morning to see him the way that she has. To _feel him,_ the way that she has. It leaves a sore ache where her thighs meet, and a languidness to her that somehow she can’t seem to shake, but it is a good pain; not like the searing lance that Katherine’s death is, whenever she closes her eyes. She dreams of the well, still, some nights - and on those nights, when the moon is round and full but nowhere near touching her skin, she reaches out in the darkness for something, anything real as they rip broken, bloodthirsty screams from her throat. She had not imagined, before now, what it would be like for somebody’s lips to brush her abused vocal cords; for their warm tongue to run circles around her, or to be given leave, for once in her life, to shatter inside of their arms. Elena had felt all his hollows, every valley and dip; and the firmness of it all’d surprised her.

Not that it should have, she thinks. After all, it’s _Elijah_ _-_ Elijah, who came to her when she was lonely, and soothed her nightmares away. _Elijah,_ who promised that he’d keep her safe, even if it meant her life. _Elijah,_ who’s always been there. He never does anything lightly. Even this, she thinks, isn’t light. There is a tightness to it, a keeping her close that the thrum of the daylight can’t break. He is wearing his ring, but Elena still wants to protect him; feels she owes that small favor to him, now, after everything. She presses herself to him closer, wills that he’ll know what it means. She has not looked in his eyes yet, can’t bear what she’ll see in them, but when they have lain there for centuries longer, she slowly raises her head.

And finds that he meets her with wonder. Wonder, and awe, and more than a little concern. Elena almost starts laughing. _How much worse could my life get?_ She wonders. _First Damon, now this?_

“Elena,” He tries, once again, “Sweet Elena, did I - Please tell me I didn’t hurt you.”

“You didn’t,” She tells him. Rolls her way off of his body, feeling the ache of his absence.

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.

**18**

She goes over to Vicki’s to study, sometimes. It isn’t quite an agreement, but Vicki is failing at math - failing at lots of things, Matt says, on the rare occasions they speak - and she finds herself wanting to help her. She didn’t ask for the life that she’s leading. And that, if nothing else, is something that she understands.

They sit in the kitchen, at the old table, cluttered in letters and bills. When Vicki goes to the bathroom, or upstairs to her room to pop pills, she gropes at the underside of it, feeling for letters burned carved with a hot, wicked point. But there are no letters, no names. No doomed people here, thinks Elena. Sometimes, when they are studying, Damon tries calling her. She watches that photo she took on a whim as it flashes across her phone screen, and thinks that the sound of the ring is the saddest, bitterest thing. Those times, Vicki looks at her with something else- Pity, if she’s placed it right, and knowing the way that it feels.

“Who is he?” She asks her, today.

“Just a friend,” Says Elena, shoving the phone into silent. It isn’t like Katherine is there, anymore, to demand that her sister pick up. That is Damon’s job, now, and Elena is sick of him. Tired of all of his games.

“Like Jeremy was?” Vicki asks, and Elena feels jealousy crash over her in a wave.

“You don’t know him,” She says, “So don’t talk about him like that.”

She doesn’t know who she’s defending - it could be Jeremy, with his shy smiles and his hidden talent for art. But when she says it, she’s picturing sharp fangs and _black._

“Whatever you say,” Vicki tells her. “But like, seriously? Why the fuck do you have friends if you _aren’t_ going to talk gossip?”

“I don’t have friends,” She says, standing up. She’ll be back here, sometime next week. Vick will lie in a pool of dark blood, and the table will have its first name.

**203**

The boy walks into the alley, and she follows him on silent feet. A blur that is less than a shadow, using what she has been taught. She heard him through the din of the club; saw his dark hair and thought, for a moment, that he might be somebody else. He told her that he wished he could go to Europe, someday, and see the rest of the world. And his eyes had been hopeful; Elena had seen that in them. He had wanted to touch her. To feel her, greedy and warm. If only he knew, thinks Elena, how cold the blood is in her veins. His is much more inviting, she thinks, as she stalks the boy through the alley, past empty milk-crates and puddles of vomit weeks old. She remembers being weeks old; the surging swell of the bloodlust, and the aching keen in her gums as she lunged for the blood bags that Damon had fitfully shoved her. He had kept her from this - the need of the hunt, the revelation of salty skin under her fangs - because he had wanted to save her.

But Damon, also, had killed her. And Elena, too, once had dreams.

She’d dreamed about going back home, wherever home was, to her. To Alaric’s flat, where her mother had left him, alone and preparing to die, with a note he had not known to look for and the ghost of her love in his sheets. _No,_ she thinks, _Mystic Falls._ The old house, with the paint flaking off of its walls, and her room on the second floor with the window that Damon had climbed through, as still and as silent as she makes herself be while she hunts. _Mercy,_ she thinks. She could show the boy mercy, but his blood smells like a good time, and he is everything willing. Everything growing and green. Elena thinks that she has forgotten about it, the way it feels, being alive. Yet it could be any feeling, anything that isn’t this. He is out with some woman, she knows. He has drank himself silly, and he’s bucking his hips into her. Sliding his fangs into her.

In the moment before her own sink down, she tells herself he has no _right._

**19**

It was not loving. It was not soft. For Damon, she thinks, it was nothing save for fulfillment. He’d had an itch that he needed to scratch, and the rub of his back against her had caught on just the right nerves. He had felt it, she knows; the resistance that should have been there, scrubbed out from between her legs. It had made him go harder, just for a minute, than she would’ve liked him to do.

“You should have waited,” Damon is telling her, now. He’s poured himself something amber and strong in a glass, and the drags of his tenterhooks are keeping Elena on edge. She has a room here, just down the hallway from his, where she stays when the house makes her cry. It was supposed to have been Alaric’s, but she wouldn’t _do that_ to him; and she’d thought, in an instant, that Alaric loved her for that, before she remembered that he wasn’t really her father. He would only ever be her history teacher who wanted her to do well, as if he didn’t know what kind of a world they lived in. Who lay next to her, when she slept. She had never asked him to kiss her again, but Elena knows this is not kissing; and as she slips on Damon’s rough t-shirt and crawls her way out of the bed, she almost trips in the dark.

“When I turn you,” He tells her, “You won’t have to worry about that.”

“You’re never going to turn me,” She says.

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie.

**59** ****

“You’ve done bad things to me, love.”

“Not me,” Elena says, “Katherine. _Katherine_ did bad things to you.”

She is fighting for it, a sliver of breath that she forgets isn’t required, and Klaus is smirking at her.

“Let’s try this again,” Says the hybrid, showing a hint of his teeth.

“No,” Says Elena. She dares herself into his eyes, heedless of his compulsion. There’s no vervain in her blood, but she knows that he’s a sick bastard. He will enjoy this, she thinks. Listing their names, and which body parts he’s scattered where. She still has time to cement it. _He’s lying to you,_ she thinks. _None of what he says is real._ It is only his way of extracting revenge on the human she couldn’t have been. Still, it cannot prepare her. Not for what Klaus is saying; the picture he weaves with his words. _I’m an artist, Elena,_ she remembers him telling her once. Decades ago, when all the pain wasn’t an ocean, and Damon had been by her side. Damon, whose head was so viciously twisted, bolted into the wooden floorboards as the werewolves were set loose on him.

“This is what you deserve, love,” Klaus tells her, tightening the rope at her neck. “You _have_ disappointed me so.”

Her weight has no bearing. Her mind has no place in her body. _You’re breaking me,_ thinks Elena. _How are you breaking me?_

( _Do the easy thing,_ Katherine’s voice culls within her. _Throw your feelings away. Make a_ weekend _of it.)_

( _Elena,_ Says Damon. _Elena._ )

She wonders where Klaus buried him. If he has a grave, with a proper grave-marker, or if Klaus had his corpse burned. And as he recites the rest of the losses, the other types of cruel torture, she thinks of the flames that would have poured off of it; thickets of bourbon and blue. He was her first love - she is not ashamed to admit it. She has sobbed it out into the darkness of the vervain-ed cellar, choked on it in her lining. His hands were the first hands that she’d ever wanted on her. _He_ hated _you,_ Klaus had told her, but it hadn’t mattered that much. What had she _done_ to him?

If she thinks too hard about it, the answer comes quite easily. She looked like Katherine. Smiled like Katherine, with lips, that like Katherine’s, were pink. She’d been kind like Katherine had been; and then, like Katherine had, she’d turned spiteful. When Damon was breaking, so frayed at the edges that walking to him was a physical impossibility, Elena had crept to his side; sucked his jacket into her nostrils, the faintness-es between her fingers, and clutched him to her like a raft. _It’s okay,_ she had told him, without thinking twice about it. _You can cry._ Damon, _you can cry too._ She remembers the things that he said to her then, now that Klaus tells them to her.

_I’ll never forgive you,_ Damon had said, fingernails breaking her wrist. The sharp twist of bones had come then, and one plantive wail for a woman who hadn’t existed.

_I don’t either,_ she thinks, as Klaus trails his way up her cheek, stopping to flick at the thin silver scar that lies on the crest of her scalp.

“Who hurt you?” He asks with, more than a lilt to his voice.

Elena says,

“Go to hell.”

**14**

Elena does well at school. Damon makes fun of her for it. She is working, still, at the Boarding House, but she chooses her paths carefully. Sneaks through the shadows like the sunlight could also hurt her. _What?_ Damon asks her, _Does Katherine have you in training?_

She does not know how to say that she’s doing it for herself.

**198**

“I’m ready, Elijah,” She tells him. She is almost two hundred years old, and the blood in her veins is like sandpaper rubbing a wound. They stand at the prow of a city. Elena sees all of its death. It shocks her, still, how humans hide themselves from it; wrap it in silky wood coffins and stick it into the ground. Do they know, she wonders, how much of a blessing it is, to be able to die and stay dead? He’s wearing that pair of impeccable shoes. A suit, she thinks, of good clothes. She doesn’t know how he found her here, and she doesn’t care much to ask. Somebody told her, once, that when vampires die they take their entire line with them. Elena breathes in the salty sea air and thinks that it might have been Katherine.

( _When she dies,_ she thinks _, she will only be taking herself._ )

**20**

Bloodlust, he tells her, is war. She wishes that she could hear him, but everything in her is _hunger._

_Hunger,_ bled raw and dry.

“Elena,” He tells her. Is it just her, she wonders, or is his patience wearing thin? Being a vampire makes her much more than Elena, and she knows that he can’t stomach it. She was already bad enough. “Do you want to end up like Stefan?”

“No,” Says Elena. Her voice sounds like it’s trembling, but they both know better than that. It’s a barely held in mental breakdown that they _really_ can’t deal with right now, and she trusts him enough to put a vervain dart in her, if it reaches that point. Yesterday he had threatened to tie her to the bed in the master suite, and the look that he’d given had told her that it was a promise. And that is the problem with it, thinks Elena.

She does not _want_ control.

She isn’t a _girl,_ anymore. She is not _bound_ by the rules of human morality. Any neck she wants snapped, she can snap. Any boy she wants killed, she can kill. She could go outside tomorrow and find a new Damon and Stefan to force into hate and regret. Drive a stake through Isobel’s heart. Damon says that it’s been five days. He tells her that he has been counting. She wants to tell him to stop.

The words won’t come out, so she asks him,

“How do you do it?”

He is kneeling by her in an instant, hand caressing her shoulder.

“Like this,” Damon tells her, holding his wrist out and meeting her wrenched, sullen gaze.

“Damon,” She tells him, “Don’t fucking do this to me.”

“Don’t swear, Elena,” He tells her. “It isn’t becoming on you.”

“I don’t care,” Says Elena. She doesn’t. She’s in her bedroom, and the blinding lights are turned off. The summer is cool on her breath. “You know what? I don’t give a fuck.”

“Fine,” Damon tells her, increasing the pressure ’til the pain of it snaps her eyes closed. “No,” He says, “You’re going to look at me, now. Do you understand me, Elena? You will _look at me now._ What game do you think you’re playing, _dying on me,_ when you know that I can’t live without you?”

“I’m not dead,” Says Elena. It’s the only thing that seems worth saying.

“No,” He says, “You’re a _fucking_ idiot, and Katherine should’ve slit your throat and thrown your corpse in a ditch.”

“Don’t,” She tells him. The rage is rising in her, chasing the sharp thirst away. It is a pleasant one, she thinks; the kind of anger that she can soak in just like a warm, sloshing bath. “Bring _Katherine_ into this.”

“This,” Says Damon, running his eyes down her body, _“_ This _is_ Katherine, Elena. You were Katherine’s _bitch.”_

Her fangs are on him. Her nails are on him. Scoring him deep, so deep. She’s shredding his jacket under her fingers, and the strips of it fall like confetti; dead leaves after a blight. He gave her his wrist but she’s gone for his neck, and his pulse pulls at her like a magnet. It was easy to do it - they descended before she had known what to do with herself, what she could _possibly_ tell him. She tears at the puncture wound savagely, forcing her fangs into it, to halt the skin as it tries to knit back together. _Fuck you,_ she spits at the flowing red richness. It burns its way down her just like the bourbon he gave her the very first time that she met him, but this time, Elena drinks carefully, not willing to waste a drop. _Keep going,_ her addled brain tells her. _Take everything, he deserves it._

_How can I?_ She thinks, _When I’ve already stolen his heart?_ It screeches her still, and she feels it all on her again: The hum of the Boarding House ceiling; the recycled air on her calves and the barest hint of her humanity, a twitching, felled phantom limb. Damon’s blood sticks to her teeth, staining her like red lipstick. He _likes_ being fed from. And she is the woman he loves.

“Control,” Damon tells her, dropping a kiss to her hair.

“Fuck you,” Elena says, pulling away from his neck.

This time, it is not silent.

**17**

“Werewolves,” Elena says.

“Werewolves.”

“How did you -

“When you’re sleeping with someone, you know.”

Elena supposes that Caroline was; it didn’t shock her, when she heard about it. If anything, it had made sense. _(Have you and Jeremy… yet?_ Caroline’d asked her. Elena had shaken her head.) They are perfect, she thinks, for each other. Caroline, cheer captain, sometimes - _often -_ neurotic. Tyler, the Timberwolf all-star. His temper and her nerves seem like a good kind of friction. It is something she’ll think about later, when she comes to terms, somehow, with the fact that werewolves exist.

“He would’ve heard,” Says Elena, barely audibly. She gets the feeling that Damon still hears it, pauses with his glass halfway to his mouth. “He would _know_ if werewolves were real.”

“Does he tell you anything?” Caroline asks, raising an eyebrow at her.

“Not really,” She tells her, “But that doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t.”

“Yeah, well - Tyler said, that if you know any - To tell them that they should watch out.”

“Why?” Asks Elena. How is it, she thinks, that she can’t say the word but has found a way to accept that her best friend’s entrenched in a vampire coven? And then there is the werewolf issue. The _werewolf_ issue, she thinks. Her mother _is_ on the Council. They don’t _technically_ have anything against werewolves.

But -

“Werewolves,” She says, “Hold a grudge. And while I appreciate that Damon can’t ever keep his mouth shut, I don’t think he’ll be able to tell you _anything_ if he’s dead.”

Elena thinks about that. Snorts out into the air.

“Are you going to tell him?” Caroline asks, when she’s regained her frail normalcy.

“It’s Damon,” She says. “What do you _think_ I’m going to do?”

( _Come with me,_ Elena will say, every bone in her body outstretched. The flames will be climbing. He’ll have a set to his jaw.)

( _Come with me,_ She will say.)

_(Go.)_

**198**

She tells herself that she held out. Tells herself she has done well for herself, tells herself that she has tried. What does it _matter,_ Elena thinks, trying? It would always have ended like this. She has never liked being cold. In the old days - way back when she was human - Damon had leant her his jacket, shrouding her in it as if it made up for the barbs. Elena should not have loved him. She realized that years ago. But what would it make her, if she let his dying mean nothing? What could it ever _mean?_

“It doesn’t need to mean anything,” Says Elijah. He says it with such finality - she hardly remembers, most of the time, what Original-ness _entails._

“If you could’ve saved him,” She asks him, into the roll of the airplane - it’s double-paned windows keeping the sunlight at bay, his daylight ring large on her finger - “Would you have?”

“My sweet, lovely Elena,” He tells her, “I would’ve killed him myself.”

She shakes her head. Squeezes her arms tight around her - _tells herself_ that she doesn’t wish they were his. She’s lived fifty years without him. Why should it bother her _now?_ Why is _she_ the weak one, the one who is small and pathetic? Why is _she_ the one who has to live with the pain? She doesn’t feel when he does it, but her body seems heated, somehow. Encapsulated in him, and she feels the planes and the muscles of him like she hasn’t since she was nineteen. He is still Elijah, she thinks to herself. Still the same man who moved over her in the slim nest of lake cabin safety, all of those long years ago. She has eight left until she is as old as he was when she asked him, and he will still be here to make sure she won’t live to see it.

“I was ready,” She tells him. “I _was._ ”

Elijah clutches her fiercely, filling up every sense, every neuron.

“Why are you always around me,” She asks, “When I’m going through it with boys?”

“The same reason any friend would be,” He tells her, “If we’re going by your logic, it’s the time when most you would need one.”

“He was a boy,” Says Elena, feeling the shaking subside. “I fell in love with a _child._ ”

And she _was_ a child, she thinks. A child, when she met Damon - not much older than that the first time he saw Katherine in her. What chance had she ever _had?_

“It’s a legitimate question,” She says, when Elijah’s clutching grows, inexplicably, tighter. She tells him, “You know that I’m right.”

“Hush,” Says Elijah. He is stroking her hair, and Elena is letting him do it. _Fifty years,_ she thinks to herself. _I shouldn’t be able to do this._

“You,” Says Elijah, “Need to stop thinking so much.”

“I’m not thinking,” She tells him, “I’m sad.”

It _feels_ like something, confessing it to Elijah.

“You’ve always been sad,” He tells her. He sounds as if he’s sad himself, underneath the kind indifference. “I always wanted to ask you -”

“You did,” Says Elena. “I answered.”

“If I could do anything that would help.”

Elena pulls back, just slightly. _It’s wrong,_ she thinks. _Elijah’s your friend. You can’t let yourself become Katherine._ But his words have ignited something in her. Not a spark, she thinks, but something that’s not resignation. Something that tells her she shouldn’t feel guilty for having wanted a life.

“I’m not going to kiss you,” She tells him.

“I wouldn’t ask you to try,” Says Elijah. “There are other things I can do, sweet Elena. I’m a vampire, did you know?”

“You may have mentioned it, once.”

“I mean it,” He tells her.

“I know,” Says Elena. She doesn’t _doubt_ that he means it. It is something entirely else.

“What would it take?” He asks, “To convince you?”

“Elijah,” She tells him, “You _can’t._ ”

“Impossible statements,” He muses, moving his hand to lightly brush at her cheek, “Shouldn’t you know more than anyone else not to discount what cannot be real?”

“You,” Says Elena, “Cannot be real, Elijah.”

“Why?” He asks her.

“Because,” She tells him. “Tomorrow, I’m going to die.”

“Elena,” He says, a warning coming through clear, “That is very foolish of you.”

“It isn’t that hard,” She tells him. “It’s not like I haven’t done it. It’s one of those things that gets easier, death. Katherine told me that once.”

Elijah flinches. She feels it.

“I knew it,” She says, and twists her head back to the window. The world looks so _fragile,_ looked at from up above. Just like her, thinks Elena, a long, faded century past.

“Before you assume what I’m thinking,” He says, a trace of the old steel in him, “I would invite you to hear my perspective on it. In the interest of fairness,” He tells her.

“Of course,” Says Elena, “Since we’re well known for being _fair._ ”

Elijah ignores her. She does not know what to make out of it, but she likes the way it reminds her of their first _proper_ meeting, surrounded by derelict farmhouse and fearful, lingering regrets.

“When I hear you speak about her,” Says Elijah, “It does indeed remind me of the woman she was. Katerina. Do you know what kind of woman she was? Did Damon Salvatore ever see fit to explain just how little she cared about others?”

“He didn’t need to,” She tells him. “Katherine _raised_ me, Elijah.”

If she were human, she’d be scared of the way that Elijah loses composure, says without saying that he had still thought she’d been _lying._ Proud of herself, like Isobel would be, for catching him off his guard.

“She took you,” He says, and his voice goes lower than sweet. “I should’ve ripped out her heart.”

“I wouldn’t,” She tells him, after a long moment’s pause - because what else is there to say? She will not let herself do it, again. He cannot ask it of her. Not after what happened the last time. “I loved him,” She tells him, “You know? I really did love him, Elijah. But I think - I’m glad, that he died.”

“What about you?” Asks Elijah, “Can you say the same for yourself?”

“I could,” Says Elena. Shrugs her shoulders just like a teenager would. Damon hated it when she did that - he said it meant she didn’t care; wasn’t thinking about anybody except for herself, and everyone knew where Elena’d learned _that_ from. “The thing is though, I grew up with _Katherine._ I think that I’m finished with it.”

“With what?” Asks Elijah, tilting her back to him.

“That thing that you do,” Says Elena, “When you don’t live your life for yourself.”

Elijah is staring at her - she thinks, like a lover would stare. Elena thinks that she wants him. _Wants him_ as more than a friend.

“Could you still do it,” She asks, “If you loved me, could you still kill me?”

“You’re asking me too many questions,” He says.

“Yeah,” Says Elena, “But would you?”

“How about I put it this way,” Elijah says, eyes darting down to her lips. “I wouldn’t let anyone else.”

**16**

“Damon,” She says, “I screwed up.”

Not ‘Damon, let me inside. Not, ‘Please, Damon, can I come in?’ He is pulling her through in a blink, depositing her on the sofa, and giving Elena his best attempt at a you-have-five-minutes glare.

“What did you do?” Damon asks. Sees her deathly hiding of it, and the necklace in her hands. “Elena,” He asks, “Did you -”

“I burned her,” She tells him. “She pushed me too far, and I -”

“You aren’t shaking,” He says, and breaks out into a smile. “It must be a hell of a burn.”

“It was,” Says Elena. “It was.”

**200**

He isn’t there, and he is.

“Elena,” He says, “Happy birthday.”

“You’re counting?” She asks him, a little incredulously. It’s the small things, she thinks, that Elijah has always noticed; and this, two hundred, it doesn’t seem small to her.

“Only centennials,” He says, a tight, pursed smile playing and tugging at him.

“How did you find me?” She asks, when they’ve come together and broken apart from the type of hug that Damon once warned her about. _You want a love that consumes you,_ he’d said, but Elena knows he was wrong. She wants not a love that consumes her, but for somebody to be consumed, and when Elijah looks at her like that - like she’s the only thing in the entire world worth betraying his family for - she knows that he’s been consumed. It’s a joke that they have, and it draws a chuckle from him.

“Elena,” He tells her, “I live here. We’ve been through this before.”

“I wanted to hear you say it,” She says. “Consider it -”

“What?” Asks Elijah, “A birthday present? You should want better things for yourself, then living with someone like me.”

He doesn’t say it insecurely, just like the fact that he is. She has seen him rip people’s heads off, tear their hearts from their chests. She has seen him soak ropes in vervain and felt his nails claw long, bloody trails down her back in the dark. But she thinks that she loves him yet more for that; more than she ever loved Damon, if love’s what she’s going to call it. They’ve had two good years together. _Happy birthday to me,_ she thinks, as Elijah searches her face for something that he cannot find. It’s almost a dare, thinks Elena. How long can she look at him, now that she knows the truth?

“You want me to leave,” Says Elena. “You’re going to make me forget.”

“You asked me to,” Says Elijah. She tells him,

“I was _sixteen._ ”

“Yes,” He tells her, “You were. And you were, also, alive. You knew yourself much better then.”

“You want me to leave you,” She says, and Elijah catches her wrist.

“You will not _listen_ to me,” Says Elijah, “I want the same thing you wanted.”

“And what was that?” Elena asks him, “For me to be lonely forever?”

“For you to keep yourself _safe,_ ” Says Elijah, harsher than he needs to say it. “A sentiment which I, for one, happen to strongly agree with.”

“Because you love me?” She asks, and he lets her wrist drop like a weight made of lead as Elena begins understanding.

“I didn’t say no,” He says, when the tears start to gather in clusters.

“Then why?” Asks Elena, “Why won’t you say it, Elijah?”

He tells her,

“It would be cruel.”

And she wonders, then, if he knows even a _fraction_ of what she’s been through.

“It would be _cruel?_ ” Says Elena. “My whole life has been cruel. Tell me you love me, or - I’ll stake myself,” She says, “Right now.”

The human-ness bleeds out of him; she sees a rippling flash of white, irrational fear go through him and into the ground. There is nothing wooden about them, but it’s not an empty threat.

“Are you negotiating with me?” He asks her.

“No,” Says Elena, “But I know that you love me.”

“Elena. It would be _cruel.”_

_“_ We’re vampires,” She says. “I’ve heard that we’re good at that.”

Elijah’s breath stills. Like her, she thinks, he’s forgotten that he doesn’t need to, and she finds herself wishing for him. She blows it out on the candle of somebody dead; a twenty year old with her head in the clouds and a Salvatore’s name on her lips.

“Elijah,” She asks, “Can I kiss you?”

He searches her face, and this time, she thinks, he finds what he’s looking for. It will never be perfect. He is going to make her forget. But imprints of him will remain, and this is one she requires - the memory, however faint, that someone is out there for her. That love can mean more than just physical fate.

“Elena,” He says, “You may do whatever you’d like.”

Later, she’ll learn, it’s a lie. 

**18**

“Tell me about her. My mother.”

It’s borne out of something - some obscure connection Elena thinks she just _feels._

“You’re standing at my doorstep at - three in the morning,” He tells her, “Are you aware of how bad this is going to look?”

“I’m not your student, Alaric,” Elena says, replacing the _You weren’t there._ He rubs a hand down his sleep-weary face and tells her,

“You should come in.”

**59**

The first proper time that she meets him, she lies on a busted-up couch. Who even _brought_ the couch here, she wonders. Who even _purchased_ the couch? There’s a note in her bloodied-up palms that has Bonnie’s handwriting on it, and gives her the faintest tingling of hope. But hope is short lived, and Damon is furious with her, for going off on her own. She does not need to see him to know. After everything, he will tell her - After _Isobel,_ for Christ’s sakes - she should have just stayed where she was. Elena had wanted things, though, and she thinks that it’s long overdue that she went to go get them.

What had she wanted, exactly?

She had wanted him to be safe.

She had wanted to _save_ him.

And Damon would not let her go.

Well fuck him, Elena thought. Fuck _anybody_ who told her what she couldn’t do. It wasn’t like she was a child - she was a grown woman, even if she didn’t look it. That’s what she’d thought almost a day ago now, and as she grits her teeth at the pain, she discovers that she regrets it. If she had just stayed at _home -_ at the safe house that’s signed in Alaric’s name, so that nobody new can get in - she wouldn’t be here in this hellhole, with aching burns spreading across her wrists and creeping, infection-like, up to her elbows. The window is opened up wide, and sunlight spills like a massacre, warning her not to move even _one_ inch from where she is bound. And to top it all of, two six-hundred year old vampires circle the couch like sharks that are angling for blood. Fucking ropes, thinks Elena. Soaked in vervain and fucking _sawdust. I’m going to kill you,_ she thinks to herself. _Damon is going to kill you._

A ring comes, then, at the door.

And Rose nods to Trevor, and Trevor nods back to Rose.

“That’s him,” She asks, “Isn’t it?”

“He isn’t going to kill you,” Says Trevor. _Because that really helps,_ thinks Elena, smirking into the ropes.

“He wanted me human,” She says, and Rose flashes her fangs. “You can tell him that Damon Salvatore did it.”

“You’d put a price on his head?” Trevor asks her. Would she, wonders Elena? She feels not above doing anything, in this moment, to get herself free and _away._ ( _You really are a Petrova,_ Isobel’d say, if she could see what she’s doing. _That’s okay,_ she would say, _So are you._ )

“Not everyone’s you,” Says Elena, choking the not-there guilt down. “Not everyone’s fucking selfless.”

“You swear a lot,” Rose says, shaking her head to herself.

“Damon won’t let me,” She tells her, “I like to call it rebellion.”

“You’re how old?” Asks Trevor, as Rose goes to answer the door. “Sixty? Isn’t that a bit old to be told what you can and can’t say?” Elena watches him narrowly. Trevor is trembling with fear - he hasn’t learned that stillness which all the books say comes with age. But he gets it, she thinks; Trevor _gets_ what it means, to want to be independent.

“I bet Rose tells you what to do,” Says Elena, squirming against the ropes. The movements track in his eyes, and she lets her smirk deepen; lets it go further, more Katherine, than she’s ever let it before.

“I met her, once,” Trevor tells her. “The other one. Katerina.”

“Katherine,” She says, “It’s the twenty-first century, _Trefor._ Get with the program already.”

“Katherine what?” Trevor asks her. Elena says,

“Katherine Pierce.”

“Is it true?” He asks, as the silence stretches, as Rose is inviting him in. She wonders what Elijah must look like - he’s an _Original_ vampire, one of the first ever made, and she, through her death, has deprived him. It can’t be worse than Damon, she thinks, when she’s gone off and done something stupid. It will just be more practiced, more perfect. More lethal to her and to hers. “Are you really Katherine’s - “

“Whatever they told you,” Elena says, “It’s none of your goddamn business.”

“So it is true,” Trevor says, eyes widening just enough. “You grew up as a Pierce.”

“I grew up a Petrova,” Elena says, growling it from low. She catches his eyes, as he walks in the room, as he lights on the agony-poison. “Don’t _fucking_ call me a Pierce.”

The memories hit her like they are a bag full of bricks. The last thing she sees before blackness takes hold is Trevor’s head hitting the wall and the thick, ocher-ed splatter of brain.

**17**

If she had a do-over, she wouldn’t have come to this house.

“Give it time,” Damon tells her, un-characteristically nicely. It’s not his fault, she thinks, that she’s woken him screaming for twenty-three nights in a row, lashing at him with nails she won’t cut until she draws his blood or hers. She knows how it must be for him - to see her, human and _bleeding_ under his sheets, and not press himself down to drink. He does it for _her,_ thinks Elena, and won’t let herself think about it. Nothing good can come out of this; she doesn’t need Katherine to say it, or Stefan to say it, or even Alaric to say it.

Elena can say it herself.

(She did the math, onc time while Damon was out.)

(A woman, on average, lives 74.2 years. She has given Katherine 22.91 percent of her life. She has given her nearly a quarter; and Katherine, her beautiful sister, would never have settled for that. She wouldn’t have settled for anything, thinks Elena.)

(She hadn’t settled for him.)

**63**

“My name is Elena,” She says, cursing the fear in her breath. She doesn’t like coffins - Katherine was buried in one, and she’s lying there, somewhere under the ground, a dead thing sustaining the living. There are _living things_ growing on Katherine, feeding off Katherine’s bones, and she knows in her heart that they still carry Katherine’s darkness. “I’m sorry,” She says, “About Niklaus. I - um. I brought you some blood.”

Kol Mikaelson, she thinks, is going to try to kill her. And what was it Bonnie once said about magic; bent over that grimoire, brows furrowed in stern concentration?

_That’s right,_ she thinks, as she offers the warlock her wrist.

Some things should just be kept buried.

**19** ****

“I have to go home,” Says Elena. She doesn’t want to go home, and Elijah seems like he knows.

“Sweet Elena,” He asks her, his voice still morning-rough. “Sweet Elena, what’s wrong?”

_You aren’t like this with anyone else,_ thinks Elena. _You won’t ever be like this, have never_ been _like this, with anyone else._ She stares at him on her side; takes him in on his own, his hair disheveled from sleep and his sharp eyelids tending to drowsy. He looks like somebody, she thinks. Like anyone normal, alive.

“Nothing,” She says, sitting up. “I just have to go home. Damon is probably worried.”

“Damon Salvatore,” Says Elijah, “Should be none of your concern.”

“You don’t understand,” Says Elena.

“You’re right,” He tells her, “I don’t.”

And she could leave it like this, with so many things still unsaid that she won’t be able to hate herself for. Or she could say ‘screw it’ and they could do it again. _Let_ Damon worry about her; let him get so angry that he’ll start trashing the house. It’s a beautiful house, thinks Elena, and she hates how he treats it sometimes. But the things that Elijah will not tell her, either, are true:

Better the Boarding House, sturdy, than her.

She does neither of these.

“Nothing is wrong,” Says Elena, “I guess I’m just thinking about.”

“Was it -”

“You _didn’t,_ ” She tells him, “You’d have known if you hurt me, Elijah.”

“Somehow,” He says, “I don’t doubt that.”

“Somehow?” She asks, cocking her head like he has to her, when her nature takes him aback.

“You’re strong,” He says, “And quite brave. Braver than you would know. But sometimes I think you forget yourself - you act as if you’re what you know, and not what you are yourself. You act like you’re one of us.”

“I act like myself,” Elena says, scowling.

“That,” Says Elijah, “Is precisely the thing that I meant.”

“You do, too,” Says Elena, scoffing and swinging her legs. It’s a larger bed than she’d thought, last night, when he’d pushed her down onto it. Her headstrong feet don’t hit the floor.

“Hmm?” Asks Elijah.

“You act like a human,” Elena tells him, “Sometimes.”

Elijah does not contradict her.

“Elena,” He says, while she worms her way into her clothing, feeling the burn of his palms, the hit of him up against her; the _feeling_ of it, that _good_ feeling no one had told her, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

“We made love,” She tells him, “You’re the first person I’ve ever fucked. And now I have to go home.”

( _Where do you live, sweet Elena?)_

_(Nowhere,_ she tells him. _With Damon._ )

“You don’t get it,” She says, “We made love.”

Elijah tells her,

“Go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, here are four songs that I had playing _a lot_ while writing this latest chapter, in no particular order: 
> 
> _Chi Mi Bhuam_ by Alasdair Whyte
> 
> _In The Aeroplane Over The Sea_ by Neutral Milk Hotel
> 
> _White Flag_ by Clairo, 
> 
> And, finally, 
> 
> _Sunday Love_ by Bats For Lashes. 


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Note: So here we are. The final chapter of this story! I was in pain while I was writing this, because a. I've loved every part of writing this story, even the hard parts, and b. This chapter breaks my heart. I don't think I've ever been as sad writing something as I was with this, and all I can ask is that you guys don't hate me too much? Thank you all again for sticking with this story, and please let me know in the comments below what you thought of this chapter or the story as a whole. Any and all feedback is welcome, even and especially constructive criticism. With that being said, I hope you like this chapter and that it does not disappoint!**

**148**

Mystic Falls is on fire.

Elena runs through streets covered in corpses, the phantom remnants of life; feels broken glass pierce through her shoe soles and drag her blood out of her. By the time that she ducks through the Grill’s busted windows, the wounds are beginning to heal. The chairs are in pieces; billiard balls roll like plucked eyes over the liquor-slick floor. She used to shoot pool with Jeremy, here. He beat her at it every time. Now he is just a bent body that lies in the woods; a vestige that wears Klaus’s wrath. He could have picked anyone, Elena thinks. Anyone living or dead. _But this, love,_ she hears, as her phone starts to ring in her pocket, _This will be so much more fun._ It’s a strong ring, a sharp ring. As sharp as the sounds in the air.

“Elena?” Damon asks, “Where the _hell_ are you?”

He sounds frantic, she thinks. Strung out. He knows things that she doesn’t know.

“Fixing things,” Says Elena.

( _What kind of a fool are you, sister? What_ here _is worth saving to you?)_

_(Everything, Katherine.)_

_(Everything,_ thinks Elena.)

“You need to come home,” Damon says.

“I don’t have a home,” Says Elena.

“Really?” He asks her, “We’re really doing this now? Stop fucking around with me, ‘Lena.”

“I’m not,” She says, “Fucking around.”

She hears, in the distance, a torrent of howling screams.

“Elena,” Damon says, “So help me _God,_ please come home.”

“Damon,” She tells him, “I can’t.”

“I -”

“Save it,” She tells him. “Tell me tomorrow, okay?”

_There won’t be a tomorrow for you, love,_ she thinks. Figures that, out of everyone else, she would hear Klaus in her head. _But if I don’t do this,_ she thinks to herself, _There won’t be a tomorrow at all._ She gets how it feels, now. She understands why he did it. _You can hate me,_ she thinks, _I won’t mind. You can hate me,_ she thinks, _Forever._ It wouldn’t be anything new.

“You don’t have to do this,” He tells her. She hears it, inside of his voice.

“You’re not a Petrova,” Elena says. And then she hangs up the phone. A slim brick of metal that she used to like talking through. She pictures it as a bourbon glass; smashes it against the singed bartop and doesn’t regret it a moment. There’s a bottle of vodka left in an overlooked cabinet. She sips at it while she waits.

Outside, her hometown is carnage. The bodies are twisted into impossible shapes, and the moon hangs down round and full. Kol told her the moon was a powerful witch element. That it pulled at werewolves as if it were a dark compulsion; forcing them to surrender. _They call it their friend,_ he had told her. _Me? I call it their weakness._

_I have met them, mother,_ she thinks, as she hears the wolves tearing into their fresh victims, the flesh rending sickly and sweet. The rush of their blood makes her gums start a low, throbbing ache. _They are nothing like you would expect._ Damon can think what he wants about them, but Kol kept his promise to her. He gave her her eighty-five years.

And oh, what years they have been. She’s thinking about Damon, now. Kissing him behind that ward house, with the ghost of a laugh on her breath. It had been such unholy architecture, but Damon’s lips were so warm. She thinks that she shouldn’t want to be doing this, drunk. But it is Klaus, she reminds herself, and she cannot stomach it sober. The vodka isn’t like blood in her. The burn of it only makes her accept that Elena is going to die. Properly, she thinks, this time. Her veins will go gray and her form will be stiff, and the old wounds, they won’t go out with her. She tilts the last of the bottle back down. She will never kiss Damon again.

(At least he will not be dead.)

She sees him come into the doorway, first.

“Klaus,” She says, and motions to him in the frame. What are the chances, Elena wonders, that she is so tied to this town that the title is in her name? But then she remembers it’s real life, and ‘fortune favors the bold’ has never been more than a lie. Klaus’s grace is far more graceful than hers; she wonders if it is a vampire trait or a Klaus one. Either way it has passed down. Makes her _feel_ as if she can do this. And she has an edge here that Katherine never has.

(Damon said, once, that she, Elena, was _nice_.)

(As Klaus strides through her earliest memories of here, she thinks it is that she is dead.)

(Or, maybe, just maybe, that she is not afraid of dying.)

“Hello, love,” Klaus says. “You smell like a Russian whore.”

“Cheers,” Says Elena. “I’d’ve saved you some, but - Actually,” She says, “Fuck you.”

“Vervain?” Klaus asks her, alight with something near hopeful. 

“What would the point be?” She asks him. “You’re already going to kill me. Why would I hurt myself first?”

“You’re getting smart,” Says the hybrid.

“Nah,” She tells him, “Just selfish.”

Klaus’s eyes flash at her. He was a person once too. And something in alcohol makes her wish that she had been human, just to feel the pull of his fangs in her neck. Pleasure, she thinks, has no mercy. It strikes indiscriminate.

“I don’t suppose,” Asks Elena, “You’d give me something to remember?”

“Why would you need to remember things when you’re dead?” Klaus asks her. She does laugh, then; throws her hair over her shoulder.

“I’m the last one,” Says Elena. “Why would you want to forget us?”

“Are you trying to sell me your body?” Asks Klaus.

“Niklaus Mikaelson,” She says, “I’m trying to sell you my soul.”

The offer appeals to Klaus, she can tell. Shimmies into the deep, cutting place where a man used to live inside him. His brother gave her eighty-five years and a spell; she thinks that it will be enough.

“And what do you have?” Klaus asks her, “That would make it a worthwhile purchase?”

“My blood,” Says Elena, and fingers the hem of her shirt. “I know how to make myself human again.”

“Vampire?” Klaus asks.

“Caroline Forbes.”

“Werewolf?” He asks.

“Tyler Lockwood.”

“Witch?” He inquires.

“Bonnie Bennett,” She says, “An old friend.”

“And the spell?” Asks Klaus.

“Your brother,” Elena says, “Kol.”

“So it was you,” Klaus tells her. “I had always wondered about that.”

“Who else did you consider?” She asks him.

“Elijah,” The hybrid confesses.

_Elijah,_ she thinks, with a pang. The one who gave her her warning. She’d thought at the time that he was - Not like the others had been. Klaus must see him on her mind.

“For years,” Says the hybrid, “I thought that it was my brother.” He’s an honorable man, love; he would do anything for his family. As for the rest,” Klaus says, toeing and kicking the glass, “My brother would make their deaths slow.”

“Does that mean that you’ll make mine quick?” Asks Elena.

“The death,” Klaus asks, “Or the fucking?”

Elena thinks of her family, and wonders if this would be wrong. It’s not like she’s married to him. She wears no rings on her fingers; and if she’s going to die tonight, she thinks that she could persuaded into wearing less. Not for Klaus, she tells herself, but for one of theirs, one of Tatia’s.

“Who decided it, anyways?” She asks of him without thinking, “That it had to be a Petrova?”

“Our mother,” He says, with a light, bitter tilt to his smile.

“Fuck your mother,” She tells him. He tells her,

“I’d rather fuck you.”

“Do it, then,” Says Elena, “Or are you a coward for me?”

Klaus, it turns out, is not one. Still, it gives her a reason to die, when Damon finds them like this, with his head buried there in the junction of her, and those noises, so incoherent and lovely, falling out from her lips. White-hot pleasure is coursing through her, and it is indeed, merciless.

Damon says nothing about it; does not even meet her eyes. Klaus pulls away, wiping her onto the back of his hand and grins.

Instead, he tells him,

“Use me.”

_You’re not a Petrova,_ she thinks. _Don’t do this, you’re not a_ Petrova.

“Oh?” Klaus says, “You tempt me. What on earth should I call this?”

“No,” She says, “Damon, please don’t. We’re going to use someone else, please, I won’t let him _touch_ you -”

“You can call this revenge.”

“You’re forgetting yourself,” Says Klaus. “You are the man that she loves.”

“I’m the man that loves her,” Says Damon, “It’s this,” He says, “Or the dawn. Elena doesn’t _get_ to leave me. Are you listening to me? She’s _mine._ ”

“Just. Like. Katarina.”

“Elena’s _not_ Katherine,” He says, “Stop telling her she’s a Petrova.”

“Stop telling her she has no choice,” Says Klaus, “You’re killing her faster than I am.”

He shows a small little thing to her then, and the kindness goes straight to her core. _He’s right,_ thinks Elena, _He’s right._ Klaus didn’t call her anything. She’s given this name to herself. Has chosen this life for herself. And now she is making her choice, as she speeds her way into standing.

“Caroline,” She says, “Or you don’t have a deal anymore.”

“What are you doing?” Klaus asks her.

“Negotiating with you.”

“Elijah,” He says, “Negotiates. I take what I want, love. And I want you to suffer. I thought that you understood that.”

“Haven’t I suffered enough?” Asks Elena.

“Lovely girl,” Klaus says, “Let’s see. You were taken from your family, raised by a murderous snake. You were robbed of your innocence young. Used and abused by someone who purported to love you; faced the fangs of a ripper, and lost the only one you had left to call yours. You fell in love and were promptly abandoned; found peace and were forced to forget it, spent one hundred and twenty-eight years running from me. You killed your own mother and turned into what you despise. Lost all ability to trust that somebody else loved you. Because of your good looks, you did not have even the choice to be seen as Elena. Am I leaving anything out?”

“The part where Katherine hated you,” She says, “The part where Tatia died.”

“No,” Klaus says, stepping closer, “You haven’t suffered enough. You will never have suffered enough. I’ll be taking that spell, now, Elena - unless, of course, you want to run? I always carry an extra.”

“Don’t touch him,” She says, and Klaus laughs.

“You’re a hypocrite, love.”

“And you’re a sick bastard,” She tells him.

“That’s why we get along.”

“No,” Says Elena, “We get along because I say we do. Because _I’ve_ stopped trying to fight you. I’m giving you what you want, Klaus. I am _giving_ my life up for you. Is it really to much to ask you; sparing my Tatia for me?”

“The asking,” He says, “Is too much.”

“And what isn’t too much?” Asks Elena, “Was Katherine too much, after all?”

“Leave Katarina out of this.”

“I can’t,” Says Elena, “She made me.”

But what does it mean, being made? She knows now what sire bonds are; the fierce, all-consuming desire to serve the aims of a master. She drowned in that bond as if Damon had pushed her head under. As if she could have loved him back. As if he were really her Tata, when she was but only his Katherine. _There we are, love,_ says the Klaus in her head. _Now are we starting to get it?_ She thinks that Katherine tried it; teaching her this. _Don’t stay in one place,_ her actions had spoken, _Unless you know you can leave it._ Damon, she thinks, as she stares into Klaus, has always been volatile. He is her first love, her last, oldest friend, and she only aches, now, with all that it means has been stolen.

“I had a good life, you know,” Says Elena, when the stretch of the silence, like flesh filling flesh, becomes too much for her to bear. “No matter what you put me through.”

“Then why?” Klaus asks, “Are you so eager to lose it?”

_Yes,_ Damon silently asks her, _Why_ are _you so eager to lose it? Tell me, Elena. I, for one, want to know._ But Elena cannot answer him. No answer, she thinks, would suffice. When everything is said and done, and she is just ashes, nothing she could say right now would spare him all of the pain. He loves her, she thinks, in his own way; loves the idea of Elena, the woman who always chose him, whose passion had bloomed in the night like a Daylighter never could.

She squares her shoulders to Klaus.

She is _nobody’s_ pawn.

“If you’re going to kill him, then do it. I won’t have let him die for nothing.”

_Human life,_ thinks Elena, _Is only a means to an end._ Then what is a vampire’s life? It is so much older and so much less for what isn’t there anymore. There is no love in their souls. She wonders if they even have them, if that’s what it is to be human, or if being human is merely, somehow, being blind.

“I won’t let him die for nothing.”

“Everyone dies for nothing,” Says Damon, “The world is still going to end.”

She hasn’t looked at him, yet, but he sounds as if he is broken. _Good,_ thinks Elena, _Feel what it feels like, for once._ She should not be doing this to him. To Damon, who is everything leather and loving to her; everything caring and cruel.

“He didn’t abandon me,” She says, sidestepping his blazing eyes. Klaus’ brows furrow; his crossed arms twitch in surprise.

“He made you forget,” Klaus tells her, “I saw him make you forget.”

Remembrance is low in her throat.

“What are you _talking_ about? Damon - he _never_ made me forget. Did you?” She asks, but Damon makes no move to answer, “Did you - did you _leave_ me?” She asks him. He shakes his head slowly at her. Klaus, besides her, laughs long.

“Oh,” He says, “He was a _fool._ He didn’t even tell you goodbye.”

_He’s right,_ thinks Elena, _He hasn’t._ She thinks that there is still time, if only she could move just a few slim inches leftwards. She could meet with his lips and they’d tell her what she needs to hear. But the spell in her pocket is jangling, and Damon is starting to cry.

“Damon,” She tells him, “It’s fine. I accept this, Damon. I choose this death for myself. It’s okay to tell me goodbye.”

“I should have killed you,” He says. And what if he had done, when she was fourteen years old? She had stood, naive, at his doorstep, shivering inside her coat. He’d been holding a glass of bourbon; had not looked passed twenty-four. She had been human, and Damon had been one of them; even living with Katherine, she thought of their kind as _them._ It would have been easy, she thinks, to put a knife through her stomach, a hand on her small throat and _push._ Katherine would’ve done it. But now Elena feels lost. The world, ahead of her, warps. Her life is naught but at lie. _Damn you,_ she thinks, _Damn compulsion._ Elena has not worn vervain to the Grill, but she still thinks they can’t touch her here.

She tells him,

“Klaus needs me alive.”

“My _sweet, lovely_ Elena,” He tells her, “Isn’t it too late for that?”

The mockery hits her like headlights do in the dark, and Klaus hides a high, sinful chuckle.

“Trouble in paradise, love?”

_I don’t live in paradise,_ she thinks, _I live here in Mystic Falls._ Soon there will be no ‘here’. But Elena remembers it, somehow; the way that this town used to look. She remembers the people that lived here, the people she’d once thought she loved. They were human and glorious, all. And their lives meant nothing to him. ( _Why should they,_ Damon had asked her, _When we’ve always been so much more?)_

_(_ They were out in the garden. _Bury him next to your aunt,_ he had told her.)

( _He was your family, too._ )

“I’m going to do it,” She says.

And Damon - he does not fight her. He does not argue at all. He nods just once, and she finds herself thinking of him. _How do you know you’re in love?_ She once asked him. She thinks that she knows it now; finally, after one hundred forty-eight years. You never know when you’re fallen in love. But if you are asking, you have.

**199**

“How long can I stay here?” She asks him. It is a different night, now, and they’ve just gotten back from the hunt. He’s taught her the right way to do it, how to keep herself in the shadows and drink without causing death. Blood tastes so much richer that way, when it is not put in a bag. Elijah slots music on while she goes up and brushes her teeth. They sleep in the same bed together. Tonight, she thinks, they will not.

“As long as you need to,” Elijah Mikaelson says; easy as if they are lovers. Elena has stayed up late just to feel for his wandering hands, but he is a gentleman, yet. Has not moved beyond kissing. How can she tell him, she wonders, that she aches for him deep in her bones, the man who has kept her alive? He would tell her that she gives him far too much credit and then he would send her away. But maybe, she thinks, just maybe, the time for leaving has come. She has traveled the world with Elijah. The memories are thorny brambles. And humans say that they _yearn_ for it, being immortal.

Elena yearns to forget.

“Are you going to let me remember?” She asks him. “Are you going to make me remember?”

“No,” He says, “Only this.”

**148**

She splits her palm with a cocktail fork and listens as Klaus says the words. They sound sour, strange on his tongue, as if even for him the magic of it is too black. She lets herself live inside them, and the screams of the good town’s descendants; thinks about Kol and the eighty-five years she was given; thinks about being 11, sleeping in Katherine’s back seat. What does it _mean,_ being human? What is _left_ of a human in her? She did not feel her transition, but she feels when it rewinds. Her fangs retract. Cotton balls are stuffed in her ears. And through all of the pain and through all of the grief, every keen knot of grief untangles. Elena just feels _alive._

It does not matter that she can’t outrun him. That she will die and stay dead.

Elena thinks it is enough.

“You told me you loved me,” She tells him. Damon sneers.

“Hush,” Klaus tells her, “Why don’t we save it for later?”

“Why did you tell me you loved me?”

“Because,” He says, “I was hurt.”

His gaze bores deep into her. _If this is you being clever,_ it tells her, _I would suggest that you stop._ But she is a human again. They know how to fight and they know how to grieve and Elena knows how to be one. She did it for twenty whole years.

“I’m going to kill you,” Klaus tells her.

Elena tells him,

“I know.”

They go to a place in the woods where grass circles are lain out neat.

“How kind of you,” He says, “To sacrifice the un-living. Would she have gone through with it, hmm?”

“If it would have stopped you,” She says.

“Nothing can stop me,” Klaus tells her, “Certainly not a girl.”

“She was a witch,” Damon says. She had almost forgotten about it, the grudging respect that he had. “You obviously don’t know witches.”

“Ah,” He says, “But I have one. If you would be so inclined?”

The girl steps out from behind the trees. She looks just like Bonnie, she thinks. But her eyes are more green, and the touch of her cheeks is more set. More moral, somehow, than she had been.

“Keep them here,” Klaus instructs her, “The lovebirds want to say goodbye.”

**19**

Though he may be patient, Elijah does not take it slow. He pushes her down to the bed and she _feels_ just how much he wants her.

“I trust you,” She tells him - “Elijah -”

“Have you ever done this?” He asks her.

“Stop talking,” She tells him.

He does.

**148**

“Who else did I love?” Asks Elena.

“You think I’m just going to tell you?”

“If you ever loved me, you will.”

“You cheated on me,” He tells her. “Back then, Elena. You did.”

“Like hell.”

“I smelled him on you,” Damon says. “For some reason, I thought that you’d learned. That you’d finally chosen me. But no - you couldn’t do that for me. You _had_ to go - _give it to him,_ Elena! You came home _covered_ in him.”

“Damon,” She says, “I’d remember. Something like that - I’d remember.”

“Not if he made you forget.”

**200**

“I know what to do,” Says Elena. She stands at the foot of the escalator, dodging the shuffling crowd. Elijah’s voice crackles, thin, on the other side of the line. _I’m doing this for you,_ thinks Elena, _Living my life, doing all of this, only for you. And you will let me forget it, Elijah. Everything else, I’ll forget._

“When you’re ready - “ He tells her.

“You’ll be there.”

Elijah hangs up the phone.

**148**

Elena is not scared of death. She is not scared when Klaus sinks his teeth into Tyler and _pulls;_ when Tyler’s corpse falls and it sounds just like her corpse will sound. She is not scared of the flames. She has no told him she loves him; she thinks that there isn’t a point. The air smells like blood and fear. They smell just the same to her. _I’ve known them too long,_ thinks Elena. _God, I’ve known you too long._

“No one can save you,” He tells her.

But at least she will not burn in hell. And he will always be lonely. His brother told her that, too. Without her - without _her_ human blood - Klaus cannot make new hybrids. She wonders if Damon knows it; if she ever managed to tell him.

Elena is not scared of death, but she thinks she might be scared of dying.

**89**

They’re staying, tonight, in New Orleans. As Damon runs the shower she goes through the hotel’s back gate, stares at a green-shelled tortoise swimming away in a pond. There’s a way that it smells here that she thinks she’ll always remember, like raw thrill and powdered sugar; the way that a shout sounds; drunk, hot, and happy, hurtled out from a rooftop. And because she is with him, the air smells, also, like Damon. Tastes like the way Damon tastes. When she breathes it in, she imagines she’s breathing in Damon.

And everything could be fine, she thinks, in the way that it wasn’t back then. She could look into his eyes and _know_ what he felt, not have to keep dancing around it. She hadn’t stood any chance against him. She had been human, and slow - sometimes, she gets the sense that he can’t adjust to the way that she does it now, keeping her way up with him. _You can’t go dancing alone,_ she had told him; once, in a different lifetime. _Watch me,_ Damon had said. _Okay,_ she had told him, _You can. But Damon,_ she’d said, _You shouldn’t._

They have been here, already, three weeks. It’s more than they usually are. How could they stay in one place, he had asked her, when there was so much of the world?

_It isn’t about that,_ Elena had told him. _Don’t you ever miss having a home?_

The wind had been going a hundred miles an hour. She had been on the back of his Harley - he picked them up, from time to time, whenever he thought he was bored. And she had thanked God for her vampire hearing, because even over the lion’s purr of the motorcycle’s heavy engine, she’d heard Damon say,

_I have you._

**148**

_No one can save you,_ he’d told her.

Elena has learned it’s a lie.

“Come with me,” She tells him. The flames are climbing higher. There is a set to his jaw, and he holds out one lone, bleeding wrist that she lowers her head to and _drinks._

“Come with me,” She says, with the knife slides through her stomach. Just enough for her to die, but not so much that she can’t run.

_Come with me,_ Elena thinks.

“Go.”

**402**

“I love you,” She tells him,. Needing to say it, just once. “I love you, Elijah.”

“I know.”

He gives her his best, tightest smile. Allows her no glimpse of the glimpse.

“I love you,” She says, with her hands all over his shirt. The breeze is a cool river on her, and he slams the stake into her chest. She gets one last look at his eyes - they are as soft now as they’ve ever been. As soft, she thinks, and as unyielding, as when she was eighteen years old. She’s choking on her own blood.

“I love you,” She says.

“So do I.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last four songs I listened to on repeat while writing this! 
> 
> _Future Starts Slow_ by The Kills
> 
> _Young and Beautiful_ by Lana Del Ray
> 
> _House of Mercy_ by Sarah Jarosz, 
> 
> And, finally, 
> 
> _Skinny Love_ by Bon Iver

**Author's Note:**

> While I realize I've gotten bad at this lately, it's a bit of a tradition to give you all a glimpse into my writing mindset by sharing a few of the songs that I couldn't stop listening to while writing particular chapters. I feel like now would be a good time to start that tradition again! So here are four songs that kept playing while I wrote this chapter! 
> 
> _A Horse Named Cold Air_ by Mitski
> 
>  _I TRIED(DEMO)_ by Bishop Briggs
> 
>  _The King Of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 1_ by Neutral Milk Hotel
> 
> And lastly, 
> 
> _Bags_ by Clairo


End file.
